Five years ago, I met a man I would soon nickname Hopkinsville’s cemetery detective. Retiree Joe Craver came to Hopkinsville in 2014 to live with his daughter’s family. When we first met for coffee one day at McDonald’s on the Boulevard, Joe shared with me the research he’d been doing on the graves of military veterans in Christian County.
Then Joe became involved with efforts to bring back the long-neglected Union Benevolent Society Cemetery on Vine Street. While volunteers, jail crews and city employees tackled decades of overgrown weeds, vines and brush that had covered most of the 700-plus graves, Joe got to work reading all of the headstones he could find and searching for the stories of people buried in the African American graveyard. He created a Find A Grave page for the cemetery and added dozens of biographies and photographs to the site.
And that’s just one of the cemeteries in Christian County where Joe has been tediously collecting and documenting stories of our county’s people.
Joe has lived in Hopkinsville for less than a decade, but I can’t think of anyone else who has added so much to the county’s historical record in such a brief time.
I had an email several days ago from Joe. He’ll be moving to North Carolina soon. His son-in-law, a minister, has a new position, and Joe will be back in his home state.
“My Christian County veterans’ grave documentation is now well over 8,300 military graves. I put a hard copy of it in the library last week,” Joe told me. He also sent an electronic copy of his research to me, and I’ll be giving a copy to the Museums of Historic Hopkinsville-Christian County.
Unfortunately, the condition of the Vine Street cemetery is declining again. Joe was there to place flags at the headstones of all the veterans for Memorial Day and discovered that the weeds are taking over.
“I was even unable to find one (of) the veterans’ stones at the coordinates that I had recorded,” he wrote. “One veteran stone had been broken into two pieces. Other stones that I had photographed and placed on Find A Grave are now nowhere to be found, either covered by weeds or buried by the heavy equipment used in the clearing of trees.”
We owe Joe Craver a great deal for caring so much about our community and our history.
Just three years, the city of Hopkinsville rededicated the Union Benevolent Cemetery. While the fanfare of that day has passed, the meaning should not.
An aside about Joe’s email: It gave me an idea that is a nod to an old style of newspaper column called a mail bag. The columnist would share bits and pieces of correspondence from readers who had something interesting to say. Look for the occasional “Mail Bag” section in future editions of The Sunday Brew newsletter.
Thanks, Joe. You’ve been a good man to have in our midst. Hopkinsville will miss you.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
