Cemetery Stories: Where is the grave of Elizabeth Dale?

The Jeffries cemetery lies on a tiny hillock of wooded land in the middle of a cornfield. I arrived in late September, dried cornstalks rustling overhead as I searched for tombstones. No road or walking path leads to the site; unlike the other cemeteries I'd visited for my research, this one was abandoned.

When I finally reached the gravesite, I found several large stone slabs broken in the dirt, overgrown by brush, brambles, and saplings from the massive holly tree looming over the cemetery. The names and engravings on the stones were covered in lichen and worn smooth by nearly 200 years of wind and water, but I knew who rested here:

Alexander Jeffries's broken tombstone, Hazel Green, AL, September 2022.

Alexander Jeffries (1773-1838); his first wife Frances Jeffries (d. 1824); Mary Elizabeth Jeffries (1837-1844), the seven-year-old daughter of Alexander and his second wife; and the empty grave of his father-in-law Adam Dale (1768-1851), veteran of the War of 1812.

Alexander Jeffries was a cotton planter in antebellum Alabama, the owner of a large estate and dozens of enslaved people to work it. When he died in 1838, he left his land and property to his second wife and their two children, naming his widow -- born Elizabeth Evans Dale -- as the executrix of his estate. Elizabeth is known to history as Mrs. Gibbons Flanagan Jeffries High Brown Routt. By the age of 56, she'd been wed and widowed six times -- a love life that's made her the subject of whispers and rumors of murder since 1838, when Alexander Jeffries died and his son Richard accused his stepmother of poisoning him.

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