Sardis and Sligo

I visited Sardis Cemetery in Fayette County, Tennessee a few weeks ago when we were driving to Virginia to see Jacob.  In it are about 50-70 graves, many of them relatives, that appear to be made up of a group of people and their descendants who moved from the Mecklenburg-Cabarrus County area of North Carolina to Fayette County, Tennessee near Memphis around 1830-1840.  All the names that I know of were Presbyterians of Scotch-Irish descent.  These people may have all known each other in North Carolina before moving to Tennessee.  There was another group of these same people about 25 miles south, in Marshall County in northern Mississippi.  I know of some of them who moved back and forth between these two areas. Our ancestors, the Crawfords and Alexanders, lived both around Holly Grove, Mississippi and also around Oakland, Tennessee, after moving from North Carolina.

My (our) great great great grandfather, Uriah Alexander, was born in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina in 1777, and moved to Fayette County, Tennessee in the 1830’s, then to Marshall County, Mississippi, 25 miles to the south.  He died in 1851 and was buried in the Philadelphia Presbyterian Cemetery in Victoria, Mississippi near Holly Springs.

This is my (our) great great grandfather, David Crawford (1804-1871).  His grave is in Sardis Cemetery, Fayette County, Tennessee. It appears that possibly the gravestone fell over or broke and someone planted it in the ground to help preserve it in its proper position.  He was born in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, moved to near Holly Grove, Mississippi, and then later near Fayette County, Tennessee.

Great grandfather Robert Winslow Irwin, who lived near Oakland, Tennessee, went to boarding school for a time before the Civil War in Holly Grove, Mississippi, and that may be where he met his future wife, Catherine Crawford, who lived near there.  The town of Holly Grove, Marshall County, Mississippi appears to have been something of a cultural center in the area until it was badly damaged during the Civil War.  Someone wrote that this group of Presbyterians from North Carolina around Holly Grove, Mississippi thought of themselves as cavaliers.  I would like to think of them as calvaliers defined as “courtly gentleman” rather than the other definition of calvaliers, “haughty and arrogant.”

Catherine Crawford and Robert Irwin in 1865.

It has been passed down by family stories that these families came from the Mecklenburg County area of North Carolina.  Mecklenburg split into two counties in 1792, and the northeastern part became Cabarrus County.  New information from church cemetery records has surfaced on where our ancestors are buried there.

My (our) grandfather, Percy Crawford Irwin, had 16 great great grandparents.  Of these eight couples, we now know the location of the graves of at least one person from each of these couples.  Surprisingly, all Percy’s great great grandparents were within 12 miles of the Poplar Tent Presbyterian Church in Concord, Cabarrus County, North Carolina.  They were all Presbyterians, and it is possible that they all knew each other.  These eight couples apparently belonged to just three churches.  Today, it would be almost inconceivable for all of a person’s great great grandparents to come from the same place.    

Where did the name for Sardis Cemetery come from?  Sardis is the name of a Greek city which is mentioned in the Bible.  It is located in present day Turkey.  There are only two churches in this country that I could find that use the name Sardis, and only one of them is Presbyterian.  It is also located 17 miles south of the Poplar Tent Church.  Its founding date was 1792, and it was (until 60 years ago) an Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.  This branch of the Presbyterian Church is one of the oldest, but also one of the smallest branches.  It only has 40,000 members today.  This is the same branch of the church that our relative, Uriah Irwin (born 1848), reported that he belonged to in an interview he gave when an article was written about him in 1887.  Uriah was a double cousin of our ancestor, Robert Winslow Irwin, and grew up on the farm next door to him.  My suspicion is that this is the branch of the Presbyterian Church that the family around Oakland, Tennessee, and possibly all the other people buried in Sardis Cemetery attended.  At the Sardis Presbyterian Church cemetery in Charlotte is buried a William Irwin, born in 1762.  This may be the uncle of our ancestor, William Irwin (born 1780).  We have this uncle listed as being born “about” 1764.

I want to point out that of the Irwin ancestors, we are only 100% sure about the ancestors back to when William Irwin (born about 1780) married Sarah Erwin (born about 1782).  This was passed down in the family, and we know this to be true.  The names of William’s brothers and sisters, parents, and grandparents were obtained by genealogy that has been pieced together by others.  This information was found by research on the ancestors of an extremely close genetic match to us, a person named Robert Christopher Irwin, who lives in Arizona.  In looking into his ancestors, William Irwin and Sarah Erwin’s names were found, and this is how we acquired information two more generations back.

Another hint about the family’s origins could be the name they gave the school that they started for their children, Sligo School.  It was a subscription school and was probably started about 1840-1845.  All of our ancestor Alexander Irwin’s children attended there, and a number of his grandchildren.  Alexander Irwin taught several terms there, his son, Harrison Irwin taught several terms there, and his grandson, Percy Irwin, taught at least one term there.

This is Sligo School as it looked in 1944.


Where did the name Sligo come from?  Sligo is a county in the northern part of Ireland and in that county is a city named Sligo.  Most of the Presbyterians who came to this country in the 1700’s were from the northern part of Ireland, where they had lived for around 50 years.  They had immigrated to Ireland from Scotland.  The question that we have not been able to answer is where in Ireland they lived prior to coming to America.  Particularly around 1727-1730, thousands of these Presbyterians left Sligo, after the rent on their land was increased greatly when their leases expired, and they were forced to tithe to the Church of England, even though they were not members of that church.    They were not allowed to marry in their own church, and so often whole congregations would move together to America.  1840-1845 would have been about 110 years after they left Ireland, so maybe there was still some memory of where they came from passed down in stories told by the family.

Another new fact that I have run across concerns our ancestor Alexander Irwin’s brother, William Irwin.  Our Alexander was born in 1807 and his brother was born in 1809.  They married sisters, Alexander married Margaret Alexander (born 1814) and William married Agnes Nancy Alexander (born 1816).  They came out from North Carolina to Tennessee and settled on adjacent farms, where both couples raised their children.  I had always assumed that both couples married before coming out west.  Our Alexander and Margaret married in 1833 in Mecklenburg County (not Cabarrus County), and came out west in 1837.  To my surprise, it turns out that their siblings William Irwin and Agnes Nancy Alexander, did not marry until 1841, and they got married in Tennessee.  Agnes Nancy Alexander moved to Fayette County, Tennessee from North Carolina with her parents and only later married William.

This is the gravestone of William Irwin, 1809-1851, in Sardis Cemetery.  He was the brother of our ancestor, Alexander Irwin, 1807-1878.


One other piece of information that I found about our ancestor Alexander Irwin is interesting.  He apparently liked to be called Alex, not Alexander.  Alexander outlived his wife by 27 years, so he would have arranged for her gravestone to be put up.  In studying the photograph that was taken in 1967 of his wife’s gravestone, the words “wife of Alex Irwin” could be seen.  When I went to Sardis Cemetery this year (2012), erosion had occurred on the gravestones, and I could not make out the names to identify which stones were Alexander and Margaret’s.  Perhaps this is from acid rain due to pollution from nearby Memphis.  However, I could make out the words from the photograph taken in 1967.

This picture was taken in 1967.  It shows the gravestones of Alexander Irwin on the left and Margaret Alexander Irwin on the right.  The picture was taken as a slide, copied to 8mm tape, then copied to VHS tape, played on the TV, and then a photograph was taken of the TV screen.  It cannot be seen on this degraded copy, but the stone on the right says, Margaret Irwin, wife of Alex Irwin.  This is his 15 year old great, great grandson, Robert Alexander Irwin in the photograph.

This is Sardis Cemetery 45 years later.  It is not a perpetual care cemetery, but to our surprise, it had been mowed.  Here I am, now age 60, in front of the gravestone of my great grandparents, Catherine Lucretia and Robert Winslow Irwin.  Catherine’s name was spelled at times with a “K” and at times with a “C”.  


Sardis Cemetery is divided into two parts.  The old section has about 50-70 graves, most of them ancestors and relatives.  The oldest gravestone that I saw was from 1851.  The most recent gravestone in the older section was from 1948 and was for Ernest Crawford, who was a double cousin of my grandfather, Percy Irwin, through both the Irwin and Crawford sides of the family.  The newer section, which is about 100 feet from the old section, contains about 15 graves.  The new section appears to be of poor families, with a few of the gravestones homemade out of cement shaped into gravestones with no names on them.  None of these appeared to be relatives of the Irwins.

I suspect that it is rare for visitors to come to this cemetery who know who the people in the older section were.  Seeing all these monuments to relatives from so long ago made it a magical place to visit.