OLD MORTON FAMILY CEMETERY
Vernon, Lamar County, Alabama
Number 174 on the 2002 Cemetery Map of Lamar County.

Surveyed August 26, 2005 by Greg Pinkerton and Paul Hays

This cemetery is located at the top of a hill east of Yellow Creek Road, about one mile north of Highway 18 at the eastern edge of Vernon. There is a sign at the wood line on the right. The cemetery is on private land, and is accessible only by a trek up the hill on foot. It is not located, as indicated on the Cemetery Map, down near the creek.

Little remains of this family cemetery. There are a dozen or more identifiable gravesites, some marked by fieldstones and others simply by depressions in the ground. Only one gravestone has been found in the past fifty years, and it had fallen and broken into four pieces before it was discovered. When assembled that stone reads:

Talitha D. Finch, wife of Thomas H. Finch, July 17, 1847 - Mar. 8, 1880.

People long familiar with this cemetery can remember no other identifiable headstones. The cemetery is near the site of the old Morton Mill on Yellow Creek, so it is probable that the other graves are of earlier members of the family that ran the mill.

The land on which the cemetery in located had passed from the Morton family long before Clarence L. Pinkerton purchased the property from Loyd Graves on Dec. 15, 1956. According to Mr. Pinkerton's son, Joe, it conveyed encumbered by the remainder of a 99-year lease on the cemetery retained by the Morton family. Shortly after the purchase, Mr. Pinkerton assembled his entire family and instructed them that as long as any of them lived, they were to protect the cemetery and see that it not be disturbed. The Pinkerton family continues to observe that mandate today.