County Road 429
Rector
Clay County
Arkansas USA
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Cemetery notes and/or description:
Mobley Family Cemetery
Rector, Clay County, Arkansas
Clay County Rd 429
From Highway 90 (Main Street) in Rector, turn west onto West 3rd Street. Go eight blocks, turn north onto N. Woodland Heights Drive. This will turn into County Road 429 once out of town. It isn't very far out of town; maybe a mile or two. The farm is on the left, and the cemetery is in a grove a fenced-in trees set about 150 feet out into the field.
Only about two-thirds of the graves are marked; there are many fieldstones marking graves, but, as it is a private family cemetery there are no complete records of all those interred. The cemetery is no longer used, so the list is complete.
The cemetery is the burial place for the Mobley family, as well as the connected Knight and Province families and the slave/servant family that worked for them for more than one hundred and fifty years. The Mobleys were originally the Mobberley family from England; over the course of the 17th-19th centuries they pioneered across Maryland, North Carolina, and Tennessee. In the early 1800s, Ransom and Priscilla Bailey Mobley lived in Weakley County, Tennessee. After his early death, she raised their seven young sons (an older son and a daughter were already married, also) alone. Some of the sons went on to Clay and Greene Counties in Arkansas in the 1860s; she followed with the rest of the family soon after. The Knight family moved with them; the families intermarried. The cemetery was started on the land of the Mobley family farm in the 1860s; the oldest marked grave is from 1876 and the most recent from 1949. There are thirty-five legible markers. The Mobley family is still prominent in Clay County.
The farm the cemetery sits on is still owned by the Mobley family. It is private property; visitors should obtain permission from the family before going to the cemetery. The cemetery is in a fenced area in the middle of a cow field, so visiting unescorted might mean a run-in with the bull. The cemetery is kept well mowed, but the field it is in is not and there is no real road across the field.
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