Hathorn Cemetery sits west of Ashland on the Coushatta road, Highway 155. The first grave is an infant, laid in a dogwood patch in 1862. A stone set in 1913 still calls that child the first grave and dates the cemetery from that year. The infant was a child of Harrison Hamilton Hathorn, known here as Squire Hathorn, born 1826, dead 1896, a Mason, buried later in these same rows with Amanda. The name Hathorn, sometimes cut Hawthorn on the older stones, stuck after two more children of log haulers were buried here in the early 1900s and marked with rocks.
How the land became a cemetery is still argued. One account says Squire Hathorn gave it. Another says George J. Walker and his wife traded two and a quarter acres for hunting dogs. A third gives the first acre to a lumber company. What the clerks did record is later and smaller: in 1950 John H. Joyner and W. M. Moss sold two acres to the heirs of H. H. Hawthorn for three dollars, and S. J. Joyner sold another acre for a dollar. A cyclone fence went up in 1954. Water reached the lot in 1963. Pines inside the fence came down in 1971 to make the place safer and leave room.
This is the smaller of Ashland’s two cemeteries, about 280 marked graves, and it is a family yard. Since 1984 the board has limited new burials to people tied by birth or marriage to the extended Hathorn line. Most of those already here were Baptist. Pullig, Walker, Hood, and Joyner stones sit among the Hathorns. The larger community cemetery is Ramah, a mile east on Highway 153.
Hathorn is one of the few cemeteries in this end of the parish with a chapel on the lot. The Chapel of Taps was dedicated 1 June 1968. Patrick Coffey, a grandson of Squire Hathorn, ran the volunteer work and died five months before the building opened. Thelma Walker McCain asked the board to put his name on it. Coffey himself was taken to Ramah. The Hathorn Cemetery Association of Ward 2, a nonprofit seated in Ashland, has run the place since 1978. Each year, on the Saturday morning before the first Sunday in June, a local minister speaks in the chapel.
The cemetery is still in use by the family it names. Come in daylight. Stay on the paths that are already cut.