Rodney Cemetery

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“The cemetery was a dark shelf, above the town, on the site of the old landing place when the ships docked from across the world a hundred years ago, and its brink was marked by an old table-like grave with its top ajar where the woodbine grew. Everywhere there, the hanging moss and the upthrust stones were in that strange graveyard shade where, by the light they give, the moss seems made of stone, and the stone of moss.”

Excerpt From: Welty, Eudora. “The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.”

Rodney Cemetery sits on a wooded bluff just east of Rodney Presbyterian, a Federal architectural historical church chartered in 1828.  Those buried within the cemetery, include early settlers, not only of this once booming river town, just three votes shy of becoming the capital of Mississippi, but also from those that lived across the river in St. Joseph. Buried here as well, are the unfortunate river travelers who met untimely deaths in what was once the wild Old Southwest. Confederate trenches were located within the cemetery, with main earthworks on the bluff behind according to its National Register Nomination in 1973. 

On February 3, 2019, Rodney History and Preservation Society held a clean up in the cemetery with over 65 volunteers in attendance. Volunteers traveled not only from all over Mississippi, but from far away as Washington, Arizona, Virginia, Florida and Louisiana.   

YOUR DONATIONS AND VOLUNTEERING AT FUTURE CLEAN UPS ALWAYS APPRECIATED.