A Black Man
In late 1918 into 1919 an influenza pandemic swept the country, indeed the world, and the Smoky Mountains were not spared. We can barely comprehend the fear that an epidemic would trigger in a community such as this with limited medical resources. Influenza deaths were common during this harrowing time, and one would live in constant worry that a loved one could well be stricken next. If your child felt bad, was this the beginning of the end?
Buried in Higdon Cemetery, above Jenkins Ridge Trail in the Hazel Creek area of the National Park, this African-American man helped tend the ill during the epidemic, before fatally contracting the disease himself. He is buried in the same cemetery as the white people he attended, but his grave is set well apart from the others and is oriented to the north, whereas all the other graves face east toward the rising sun in the Christian tradition of facing the Second Coming. (Cherokee and Puritan cultures are said to have aligned their burials north/south, but this man would have been neither.)
According to Smoky Mountain cemetery historian Jacqueline Lott Ashwell's masters thesis, "no one living can remember his name or who he was," which suggests that he wasn't buried anonymously as "Black Man" by his contemporaries, but under an uninscribed headstone, just as most of the other original stones in this cemetery were uninscribed. The culture of the times might explain why his grave is isolated from other members of the community, but it still leaves open the question of why they chose not to bury him facing eastward like everyone else.
Today the grave bears a modern marker, is mounded and is decorated with the same respect afforded the other burials.