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When the Tennessee Valley Authority inundated the land near Hiawassee in 1941, some relatives came to rescue buried remains of relatives from land that would become an island; and some did not.
Jerry Taylor steps onto Cemetery Island with a grin, ready to tell who’s been moved and who’s been left behind.
Like Sheriff Rufus Pinson Burch, who was buried here and never moved—even when the mass exodus from this cemetery occurred in 1941.
“This set of Burches didn’t want to be moved,” says Taylor, the historian of Towns County, Georgia. “And some of the descendants are trying to figure out who’s who and put stones up to the ones who didn’t get moved.”
Taylor’s ancestors, the Burches, once owned this land in Towns County and rank among the first people to be buried here in the mid-1800s.
“And then, through the years, neighbors and others were buried here,” Taylor says. “It was quite a cemetery. Probably, like 350 graves or so—maybe a little bit more.”
Then came the construction of Lake Chatuge in 1941 by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) at Hiawassee, Georgia.
“Lots of cemeteries were moved by the TVA—in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee,” Taylor says.
