This article is reprinted from an old newspaper article written by Ralph Ramos the State Editor. The newspaper's name and date of printing are unavailable.

By RALPH RAMOS

State Editor

OLD HARDIN - Some call it "The Hanging Graveyard, " to most folks it's the old Negro burial grounds at Hardin County's original county seat site.

Neal Wright, erstwhile Big Thicket guide and Thicket resident, figures the one-acre plot ought to be preserved. If some one would "go to bat" for the idea he and his boys would be willing to clear and clean the burial ground, even erect a fence with a little help on the fencing.

But that as it may there's a tale to be told about that graveyard if the facts were all available; they're not, the whole thing is nebulous as can be, a few hand-me-down tales; that's about it.

Most of the sunken graves are laid traditionally east-west but there are eight of them when the occupants were planted in the north-and-south direction.

"There was an old saying, " Write tells you, "where one is hung by the neck until dead, he should be buried north and south." He doesn't know which way heads or toes should face and never has heard.

Wright has counted 53 graves in that thicket of tangled tie vines and understory brush. Out of the foot of one traditional east-west graves grows a giant gum tree, maybe four feet in diameter. The headstone dates the burial in 1890.

Once, Wright tells you, there were makers on most of these graves, but now there are only two headstones remaining. On those so-called "hanging graves" were wooded headboards and a couple made with a soft sandstone which had weathered away. Wright remembers one that had an 1875 date on it.

"The way the story goes, " Wright explains, "these eight were hung right here in the graveyard. Folks said they had collaborated, been sympathetic with the North, while Hardin's menfolks were off fighting the war for the South."

"I figure, " Wright goes on, "that when these men came home and got settled down the word got around about the Union sympathizers. They gathered up these eight, hung them and buried them right there, laying them out north to south."

The place is so neglected and overgrown no one could give direction to finding the place. It's a mile or so off the highway; a half-mile from the Old Hardin Cemetery.

Wright said the colored won't go near the place. "The word going around is the place is haunted."

Maybe that's because there are so many sinks where graves were; there are sinks all over that acre, most of them east to west.

Wright said that when there were tombstones and markers there he had read many of them. "Most of these people were freed slaves. " he assures.

He once found a gravestone marking the grave of a black Union soldier killed in battle, his body returned in later years to Old Hardin. "The tombstone had crossed cannons engraved on it."

But, like all the other old stones in this neglected, perhaps haunted Old Hardin graveyard, this one, too, had been carted away by the ghoul who didn't molest the bodies but did destroy identities.

Like any other cemetery Old Hardin's black graveyard, the hanging graveyard, the haunted graveyard, should be hallowed ground. Wright prays for its preservation.