Floral Hills Memorial Gardens near Ooltewah is so overgrown that William Paris had to hack his way through with a machete recently when he went looking for his mother’s grave.
He also found trash and a dead, bloated deer on the unkempt 11-acre property at 4546 Pattentown Road.
He remembers the site being well-kept and full of visible headstones when he buried his mother there in the 1980s. But over the next three decades, Paris had three heart attacks and battled other illnesses that kept him from the cemetery.
“Anybody in 1988 or 1989 can tell you there were headstones everywhere,” he said. “How it got like this I have no idea.”
He stood near a heap of dumped tires and made this vow: “I want to find out who is responsible and get them to clean it up.”
In the meantime, he and a handful of residents from the nearby Summit community are doing what they can to improve the mess.
The volunteers, including some with the Tri-Community Fire Department, gather to clean the cemetery on Saturdays. They started several weeks ago.
“It was a pretty place, but nobody kept it up,” said longtime Summit resident Jerry Stewart, who lives near the site and participates in the efforts.
Paris said chainsaws are needed to cut trees that have sprung up, many of them growing out of graves.
He plans to start a GoFundMe page to raise nearly $1,000 toward two title searches for the cemetery’s owner. While the 11-acre site has graves, Paris also believes more are on the better-kept 14 acres next to it. The Hamilton County register of deeds has no information on the 14 acres and suggested a title search to find the owner, he said.
The fee is about $400 to $450 for each title search, Paris said.
“We can clean it now, but two years later, what happens?” he said.
The Hamilton County Register of Deeds lists the late Walter C. Champion Sr. as the original owner of the site. The county also has documents indicating the property has been sold since Champion’s ownership, but the current ownership is unclear.
Undertakers still bury people there when they can get to a plot. Bradley Antoine Dossett Sr. was buried there on Aug. 20, 2015, according to the grave marker.
Visitors can also see efforts to maintain some graves, despite the forestlike overgrowth.
The writing doesn’t show on some markers. Paris suspects some headstones and vases have been stolen. Among those that can be read is a marker for William Carmicheal, who lived from 1942 to 2009, and served in the U.S. Army. And there’s Steward Grandy, who lived from 1958 to 1979 and was the first black fireman with the Tri-Community Fire Department, Paris said.
Paris started researching the site and trying to track down an owner this year. Gina Barberee is helping his research into the cemetery that includes markers from at least the late 1890s.
Barberee would like to see offenders who have to do community service be assigned to clean the cemetery. She struggled through briars this week trying to clean brush from graves with her hands, she said.
“If my family was here I’d be in jail,” Barberee said. “This is a disgrace.”
Contact staff writer Yolanda Putman at 423-757-6431 or yputman@timesfreepress.com.