Oldest Owsley County cemetery ties pioneer family history to preservation effort

The Old Richard Reynolds Cemetery on Highway 28 East, about 2 3/4 miles from Booneville, ties Owsley County’s earliest settlement story to a preservation problem that is still unfinished. The cemetery transcription names Richard Reynolds, born around 1770, as the first Reynolds to settle in what is now Owsley County, and it places Pleasant Reynolds, a War of 1812 veteran born in 1791, among the same burial ground’s key names. What is at stake is bigger than one family plot: when graves, stones, and records disappear, the county loses one of its clearest records of who arrived first, where they lived, and how the first households took root along the creeks and ridges of this remote mountain county.

A burial ground that maps the county’s first families

The Reynolds cemetery sits inside the same settlement era that shaped Owsley County itself. The county historical society says the first permanent settlers in the area now composing Owsley County were James Moore, John Abner, Henry Gabbard, William Baker and William Neal, who arrived in spring 1798, and that most of the county was still uninhabited as late as 1815. Owsley County was created on January 23, 1843, from Clay, Estill and Breathitt counties, and Booneville became the county seat in 1843 before being incorporated in 1846.

That timeline matters because the Reynolds family belongs to the county’s first settlement layer, not a later chapter. The cemetery transcription dated 02/14/2006 lists not only Richard Reynolds and Pleasant Reynolds, but also Richard Reynolds II and Jemima Scribner Reynolds, showing the site as a family marker across generations. A separate Reynolds genealogy page places Richard Coleman Reynolds’s birth in 1770 in Henry County, Virginia, and his death in 1823 in Clay County, Kentucky, and it lists eight children, including Pleasant W. Reynolds, Tobias Reynolds, Cecelia Reynolds, Temperance Reynolds, Lydia Elizabeth Reynolds, Richard Reynolds Jr., Sarah Reynolds and Abisa Reynolds.

What the cemetery lost, and why that loss matters

The preservation problem is not theoretical. The Three Forks of the Kentucky River Historical Association says the Richard Reynolds cemetery, one of the oldest graveyards in Owsley County, was destroyed. That destruction leaves researchers to reconstruct the burial ground from transcriptions, surviving markers and family records rather than from the site itself. Three Forks says James Bowman and Leland Porter were needed to identify who had been buried there, and it notes that one small recovery step has been completed: a government marker for Pleasant Reynolds was replaced.

That kind of loss affects more than genealogy. Cemetery destruction erases land memory, the local record of where families settled and how kin networks spread over time. It also makes it harder to connect the county’s early households to the places they built, farmed and buried their dead. In a county where Booneville sits on the South Fork of the Kentucky River and many families have stayed rooted across generations, an unmarked or damaged grave can become a missing page in the county’s own record.

The surviving records show how much can still be recovered if the site is treated as an archive as well as a burial ground. Find a Grave currently lists 27 memorial records for the Old Richard Reynolds Cemetery, while PeopleLegacy lists 29 burial records. Those databases are not the final word, but they offer a workable starting point for confirming names and dates, including Pleasant W. Reynolds, shown there as born in North Carolina in 1791 and dying on June 2, 1850, Richard Reynolds Jr., born in 1802, and Anna Moore Reynolds, buried there with dates of 1843 to 1916. That later burial shows the cemetery remained in use well beyond the pioneer generation.

The Reynolds home at Cow Creek adds another layer of context

The cemetery is part of a larger Reynolds landscape. The Noble Pioneer Museum and Village page says the Richard Reynolds home on Cow Creek was built around 1813 and was donated by Beverly Reynolds Turner. That home’s reconstruction site gives the family story a physical anchor beyond the graveyard, linking early settlement, domestic life and present-day preservation work in one place.

Together, the cemetery and the reconstructed home show why Owsley County’s early sites should be treated as a connected heritage landscape. They identify where one of the county’s first settler families lived, where descendants remained, and how local memory has been carried forward even after the cemetery itself suffered damage. The Reynolds story also fits the wider county history that the historical society records: a small number of families arriving in the late 1700s, a largely unsettled county through much of the early 1800s, and later communities built around Booneville and the river corridor.

What restoration would require now

Restoring or stabilizing the site would take more than a single marker. It would require a careful inventory of every known burial, a comparison of family transcriptions with surviving stones and memorial databases, and field work to identify where graves once stood. The names associated with the cemetery already point the way: Richard Reynolds, Elizabeth McLemore Reynolds, Pleasant Reynolds, Richard Reynolds II, Jemima Scribner Reynolds and later descendants all belong in a documented list that can guide any future protection effort.

It would also take a clear steward. The record does not point to one public agency in charge of day-to-day care, which is part of the risk. What it does show is shared responsibility: Cow Creek residents once took up a collection to buy the large monument listing the Reynolds family buried there after the cemetery was destroyed, and the Three Forks association has already documented the loss and the replacement of Pleasant Reynolds’ government marker. The stewardship model is therefore local, communal and family-based, not abstract.

A restoration effort would likely need:

• a fresh site survey to locate remaining stones and burial spaces
• transcription work to preserve names, dates and family links
• marker repair or replacement where stones are missing or damaged
• coordination between descendants, the Owsley County Historical Society, the Three Forks association and the Noble Pioneer Museum
• routine maintenance so brush, erosion and neglect do not finish the damage that destruction began

How local families and groups can help

The most practical help starts with information. Descendants of the Reynolds family, and families connected to the earliest Owsley County settlers, can compare what they know with the cemetery transcription, the family group sheet and the burial records already online. Oral history matters here, especially for identifying graves that no longer have readable stones and for matching family memory to documented names such as Pleasant Reynolds, Tobias Reynolds and Richard Reynolds Jr.

Support can also be simple and direct. Donations to marker replacement, volunteer labor for grounds care, and contributions of old family records can all strengthen the effort already underway. The county’s early history is not preserved by one archive alone. It survives when families, historians and local institutions treat a destroyed cemetery not as a lost place, but as a record that still needs caretakers.