20 Nov 2015
Good Morning

As a young boy I used to walk thru this cemetery.

Between the years of 1959 and 1966 the children in the area told ghost stories about the graves. It was said the ghost of the buried would come out to check on their old farmhouse and they would travel down Douglas St to the Black Bayou to water their horses.

I am ashamed of having played in the Cemetery now as I am a contributor to ADD A Grave (?) but the mystery of who the people were was with me back then. I guess that was my first experience with an old unknown graveyard.

I thought of this place recently as I was looking for places to research and finally found the name and came across yours.

Wanted to let you know that all the headstones were upright and there in 1962 and a few went missing after that. I too figured they were hauled off by "relic" hunters.

I just wanted to say thank you for your efforts. I grew up there between 1958 and 1972.

Have a Great Day

Terry W. LaFrain

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Feb 14 2008, Valentine's Day.

This is a very old, neglected and abused cemetery in the Normal Station area near the University of Memphis; named so because of the existence of West Tennessee State Normal School, a teacher's school, thus the word Normal in the name. There are a total of nine markers of which only four remain intact; all others include only the base. Of those, four remain unattributed. The other is assumed to belong to Francis (AKA, Francois / Frank) Bibert, a French gardener from Alsace. It is known he is buried here and the base is located where you would think a spouse's stone would be placed; side-by-side. There are still living descendants of the Biberts.

This cemetery is in a middle of the Normal Station Historical District and has been unkempt for quite sometime; somewhat like many of the houses in the area. One wonders if trying to clean it up and preserve the cemetery might invite more harm to what remains than just leaving it alone. It has been reported that there were a large number of gravesites in this area and that they were destroyed during residential development in the early 20th century. It is also generally believed that many slaves were buried nearby before the war.

The newest known grave is dated 1935, about the time the area became developed for housing. Previously it was 5000 acres of Revolutionary War land grants (2) which, over the years, were parceled off. Black Bayou (now channelized and mostly concrete) is one block away and this area was still an Indian hunting area when the land grants were issued in 1825. Prior to the war the are was owned by white farmers and merchants but in the 1880 census while it was still mostly unchanged in terms of usage it was composed of a diverse mix of whites, black and immigrants; a huge change in the 15 years after the war.

In the early to mid 30's the nature changed from rural to urban.