Page 22 - FEATURE – Mountain Monthly, October 1999

"SEVEN GRAVES",

CLOUDCROFT'S CEMETERY

By Beth Wilson

Seven Graves, as the Cloudcroft Cemetery has come to be known, is located to the west of the ball fields on Forest Service land. It is no longer used, but holds an estimated 14 graves, 13 of which are unmarked. According to research done through the Sacramento Mountains Historical Museum, the following people are buried in unmarked graves: Mrs. W. H. Watkins (1904); W. F. Baker (1905), a prominent Cloudcroft butcher who disappeared for a year before his body was found in the woods, cause of death unknown; Charles Parquett (1907); Walter Elmore (1909), who died at age 22 in a tragic sawmill accident; Carrie Frances Bonnell (1911), premature baby born to Frank and Lulu Bonnell; Lucas Mancillas (1915); Catarino Franco (1918), well-known handyman; T. F. Voight (1918); Leland Longwell (1924), a stillborn baby; Jesus Avila and a second baby boy (c.1931), children of Joe Avila who drove the deceased to the cemetery and buried them: and Lucas Medina (1932), a baby who died at the Baby Sanatorium.

EMILY "EMMA" FLORENCE SPEARS RUSSELL

The only visible and maintained grave at Seven Graves is that of Emma Russell. Emma was born in Texas in Nov. 1857 (it says 1857 on the headstone placed there later by her family, but census records have her birth year as 1852). She was one of the twelve children of Abner and Betsy Spiers (the name spelling differs among documents.) All of the other Spiers children and family members are buried in a family cemetery in Elgin, TX., except for Emma. She had two sons by her first husband, James and William Brown. Her second husband was John Alexander Russell, and they had four other children. John abandoned the family and remarried; John and Emma's son Sam worked at a local sawmill to support his siblings and mother. Emma suffered from asthma and died of pneumonia on September 17, 1911. In 1937, Emma's daughter Fannie and husband Lige Mitchell placed the large cross seen on Emma's grave as she was Catholic. Her family has since fenced and maintained her gravesite.  There is a wood cross behind her grave marker.