Less than 100 yards down and across the road from Oakwood Cemetery on North Knox Street stands a private cemetery that, seemingly, only time remembers.

“All I’ve ever heard the cemetery called is Knox Cemetery but the names on the gravestones are Copelands,” said Willie Fred Jones, who lives across the street from the cemetery. “The city mows around the fence and, maybe, once a year a man and a woman come and do around in it a little but it’s real run down.”

Crumbling tombstones sit among the decayed stumps of three large cedar trees and scattered broken glass, rocks, bricks and sticks.

Jones said he has been living at his present address for seven years and he often wonders who is buried in the graves that date back to the mid- to late-1800s.

“The graves with the slabs say ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ and one of them is broken off and you can see down in the hole,” Jones said. “I looked in there once and saw what looked like bones. But I don’t see them now. Dogs or possums could have gotten in here. Kids come around and get inside the fence. I’ll holler and tell them to get out of the cemetery. Sometimes they run. Sometimes they don’t.”

Just how many people are buried in the private cemetery perhaps no one knows.

“This grave had bricks around it but just about all of them have been knocked down or broke,” Jones said. “Looks like one grave was marked with this piece of rock with letters on it but I don’t know where it goes.”

Jones pointed out a patch of grass that he guessed is where a baby was buried.

“This rock may be the head of the grave or it could just be a loose rock,” he said. “But, to me, from the grass, it looks like where a baby’s grave was.”

Jones said the private cemetery has been there a long time.

“When I was a little boy a long time ago, this was all woods and we’d come over here and play,” he said. “But I never did go in that cemetery. I don’t believe in haunts or things like that but I have respect for dead people. I was taught that.”

When he got older, Jones said he hunted the woods around “Knox Cemetery” and now he lives across from it.

“In all the years, I don’t remember any flowers on the graves,” he said. “There could have been some a long time ago and I don’t remember. But nobody puts flowers on those graves.”

Gray, decayed stumps and littered ground mark the places where loved ones, now unknown, rest in peace at Knox Cemetery.