William Edmondson, a Quarry Accident, and a Vanished Black Cemetery

There’s a story about how famed Nashville sculptor William Edmondson made a headstone for a guy from the quarry in Newsom’s Station. I read it in John Michael Vlach’s book By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife. Vlach writes:

When the black quarry workers employed at the Ezell Mill and Stone Company quarry in Newsome Station, Tennessee, came to town with their deliveries of building materials, they would steer past Edmondson’s house on 14th Avenue to drop off the odd-sized stones that the contractor thought unusable. These men were no doubt intrigued with Edmondson’s creative efforts and supported him by augmenting his supplies of limestone. The quarrymen’s goodwill was later underscored when one of their crew was killed in an accident and Edmondson was asked to make a monument for their slain colleague. (P. 113)

I wrote about this a while back, and the main problem with the story is that the Ezell Mill and Stone Company closed in the late 1920s, and Edmondson didn’t start carving until the 1930s. So unless these guys had a premonition of what Edmondson would get up to, they likely weren’t dropping limestone off at his house.

But the story sticks in my craw, because if you take out the location, it sounds completely plausible. Edmondson was carving scrap limestone. His family was in the stonecutting business. They would have known other quarry workers. If a quarry worker was killed in a work accident, Edmondson could have made his headstone. And the story has a specific name — the Ezell Mill and Stone Company. That’s not something Vlach came up with. Someone told him some version of that name.

So I wondered: If we took "Newsome’s Station" out of it, is there an incident that fits the timeline? A Black guy who died in a quarry accident while Edmondson was carving?

And y’all! There is. On the morning of March 24, 1944, two men were killed and two men were injured when a detonation went wrong at the Franklin Limestone Company quarry in Antioch. One of the injured men was Ben Begley, who died during surgery the next day, as they attempted to remove rock from his guts. Begley was a 55-year-old Black guy who had been working at the quarry for 15 years. He had a wife and nine kids and was beloved in his neighborhood. It also seems likely that his uncle was the infamous Sherman Begley, who was acquitted of killing a white neighbor but convicted of shooting his kids’ Black school teacher while bragging about killing the white neighbor. But if anyone held that against the rest of the Begleys, I didn’t find out about it.

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On the Hunt for More of William Edmondson's Headstones

I headed out to the Pegram area to look for gravestones made by the legendary local Black artist 

This quarry is now owned by Vulcan. It sits out by the airport. Guess the name of the road that takes you right by it. Franklin Limestone Road. OK, yes, Franklin Limestone Road, but come on! That’s not the road I mean, and we both know it. Ezell Pike. I mean Ezell Pike.

What if the person who told Vlach that story called it the Ezell quarry, meaning the quarry along Ezell Pike, but Vlach took it to mean the quarry owned by a company called Ezell?

And come on! It’s much more likely that someone coming into the city up Murfreesboro Pike to drop off stone is going to swing over to Edgehill to drop stone off for Edmondson than it is that someone from Newsom's Station would go so far out of his way.

If a guy killed in a quarry accident got an Edmondson headstone, if that story is true, then the most likely guy — in fact the only Black guy I could find killed in a quarry accident during Edmonson’s carving years — is Ben Begley.

But this is an answerable question, right? Either Ben Begley has an Edmondson headstone or he doesn’t. All I have to do is go to the cemetery where Begley is buried and see if there’s an Edmondson on his grave. According to his death certificate, he’s buried in the “Hamilton Cemetery.” According to the death certificates of the children of his that died before he did, they’re buried in the “Begley Cemetery.” His wife Lela is buried in the “Blair-Begley Cemetery.” I’m assuming these are all the same place. Lela was buried in 1993. The Davidson County Cemetery survey was in 2000.

This cemetery has to be some place. A cemetery that saw a burial in 1993 does not vanish from the earth by 2000. And yet I can’t find it. It’s not on any maps. It’s not listed as a known cemetery in the parcel viewer. It’s not in the cemetery survey. And there aren’t any of Ben Begley’s family listed on the site Find-a-Grave, so if the cemetery goes by another name, we can’t use the presence of Begleys to tip us off.

This is fascinating. Frustrating too, but fascinating. We have a story about an Edmondson with a possible recipient we can’t verify, because the cemetery it may or may not be in has vanished. In two obituaries — Mary Francis Kelly, died 1958, and Maggie Huggins, died 1957 — the cemetery is said to be on Smith Springs Road. But there’s no known Black cemetery on Smith Springs Road.

But here's the stunning part. I’m still thinking that this cemetery could just be known by another name now, so I started going through old obituaries to find cemeteries in Antioch with Black people buried in them. I found the Benevolent Order Cemetery (which still exists on Hamilton Church Road), the “community cemetery” in Antioch, the Antioch cemetery (which could be the community cemetery, I suppose), and the Brown family cemetery, none of which appear to exist anymore. 

I had to stop looking. I don’t know if that makes me a coward or what, but I own it. As weird as it is that one cemetery — with a burial in 1993, just seven years before Davidson County went out and laid eyes on all the cemeteries we could find — could be lost, anything can happen once by accident. But the Brown family cemetery too? And then at least one whole village cemetery (assuming the Antioch cemetery and the community cemetery are the same place). That feels like a decision, that these people and these places weren’t worth honoring. That sucks, to put it mildly.

But it’s October. Spooky season. And maybe, just maybe, if you’re driving along Smith Springs Road at night, you might see the echo of the Begley Cemetery and the faint phantom of a rumored Edmondson marking one of the graves. And what we can’t know in fact, we can honor in legend.

And by God, if you see a ghost cemetery in Antioch, get a hold of me immediately.