The Cooper Family Cemetery lies behind the Mt. Calvary Baptist Church. The cemetery has a fragmentary, barbed-wire and wooden fence around its northern edge and drops off precipitously to the south where a later railroad track cut through the cemetery. The majority of the burials are marked with locally available fieldstones, some carved and some unaltered. In addition there is one pink quartz stone (number 21) and one metal marker (number 42). The metal marker had a fragmentary piece of paper in it. The paper was highly eroded and ripped. The legible letters read “A[][]” and “[initial] Co[]per.” Although hard to prove, the paper may be associated with the burial of Alice Cooper who died in 1937 (age 100). The on-line J.F. Bell Funeral Home database lists her as being buried in “Ivy Depot.”

Unfortunately, no other marker in the cemetery contained a legible inscription. Given that the other markers were naturally occurring fieldstones, they were probably never inscribed. There is some diversity among the fieldstones: some are flush with the ground, others are carved into a two-dimensional headstone (reminiscent of 19th Century gravestones), and others are upright blocks. Given the presence of roughly 50 gravestones and many more unmarked depressions, plus the total space that was originally enclosed by the fence, there may be as many as 250 burials in this cemetery. Because of the several dozen+ burials, this was probably a community burial ground that predates the contemporary African-American church (Mt Calvary). Note, the church has two burial grounds, listed in the database as Mt Calvary Historic and Mt Calvary Modern.