Shiloh Cemetery
Shiloh Cemetery (also called Beulah Primitive Baptist Church Cemetery) is the oldest cemetery in Leeds. It was established as early as 1815 on a two-acre site alongside the Ashville-Montevallo Public Road (now Ashville Road). Originally it stood next to the log-built Shiloh Presbyterian Church, but that building was relocated in 1878. Since then the former church site has been used by the First Methodist Church of Leeds, the First Baptist Church of Leeds, and the Beulah Primitive Baptist Church, which left its building vacant when it moved a couple of miles north. An adjoining site was home to the First Baptist Church of Leeds, later Pathway Baptist Church, which was destroyed by fire in January 2024.
Members of several old Leeds families and their slaves were buried in the cemetery before the Civil War. Many of the graves bear hand-hewn sandstone or limestone markers with no legible inscriptions.
Just downstream of the cemetery on the bank of the Little Cahaba River is a rock-walled spring used for drinking water when the site was little more than a stop between Montevallo and Ashville.
In August 1979 Sherri Clinksales and Martha Rogers surveyed the markers for those born before 1900. Their list is included as an appendix to the book Leeds, Her Story, published the same year by the Leeds Bicentennial Commission. Hester Smith and Madge Hahn performed a complete census in January 1982, included in Cemeteries of Jefferson County, Alabama, Volume I, published by the Birmingham Public Library and Birmingham Genealogical Society.
Notable burials
- Speers Jones (1793-1861)
- John McLaughlin (1792-1863) and Margaret McLaughlin (1796-?)
- Alexander Godwin (1795-1883) and Margaret Godwin (1797-1866)
- John Oliver (1805-1883) and Elizabeth Oliver (1807-1885)
- Thomas Rowan (1818-1883) and Margaret Rowan (1819-1897)
- Jesse Pearson (1818-1904)
- Edward Hurst (1822-1892) and M. J. Hurst (1833-1908)
- Alexander McLaughlin (1823-1891)
- Isaac McGuire (1823-1849)
- Ashton Bailey (1827-1863) and Margaret Bailey (1827-1911)
References
- Leeds Bicentennial Commission History Committee (1979) Leeds: Her Story. Leeds: Leeds Bicentennial Commission/Higginbotham, Inc.
- Hahn, Marilyn Davis (1982) Cemeteries of Jefferson County, Alabama Volume One. Birmingham: Birmingham Public Library