Ida Bell Cemetery

The following is a list of those buried at the Ida Bell Cemetery based on the documented gravestones with inscriptions.

A review of records from the Pence Funeral Home from 1904 to 1945 provides additional information about the individuals very likely buried at the Ida Bell Cemetery. The following is a list of African American people buried in "Palarm" or the "Palarm Cemetery". Several of the individuals with inscribed gravestones are included in the Pence Funeral Home records but more of the people in the funeral home records that were buried in the Palarm Cemetery did not have inscribed gravestones.

The most common type of symbolism found on the gravestones at Ida Bell are those related to the imagery of the mutual aid societies that funded members' gravestones.

The names and birth and death dates of individuals buried at Ida Bell provides us with a small bit of information about what life was like for some of the people interred here. At least eight people interred at Ida Bell with engraved headstones were born before emancipation and were likely enslaved for part of their life. This includes Millie and Samuel Agee (born around 1850 and 1840 respectively), Newton (N. C. ) Coleman (born around 1851), Theodosia Cunningham (born 1824), Susan Foster (born around 1851), Charley Noble (born in 1849), Cornelia Thompson (born 1853), and Wilson Burke, who fought in the Civil War.

By looking at census records and tax schedules, we can learn even more about the lives of those buried at Ida Bell. For example, see additional records related to the Agee family below.

This is just a brief glimpse at what could be learned about the people who lived and died in the Palarm area in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Additional documentary research in addition to oral histories could paint a much more complete picture.

Adkins, LaTrese Evette 2003 "And Who Has the Body?" The Historical Significance of African American Funerary Display. Unpublished dissertation, Michigan State University

Beito, D. T. 2000 From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967.

Jeter, Marvin D. and Charlotte M. Copeland 1997 Mosaic Templars of America Tombstones (1912-1930) and Symbolism, in Arkansas, the Southeast and Beyond. Paper presented at the Arkansas Archeological Society Meeting, September 27, 1997, Little Rock

Matkin-Rawn, Story 2013 The Great Negro State of the Country: Arkansas's Reconstruction and the Other Great Migration. Arkansas Historical Quarterly 72(1): 1-41.

2014 Send Forth More Laborers into the Vineyard: Understanding the African American Exodus to Arkansas. In Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: New Perspectives, edited by John A. Kirk, pp. 31-45. University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville.

Nutty, Coleen Lou 1978 Cemetery Symbolism of Prairie Pioneers: Gravestone Art and Social Change in Story County, Iowa. Unpublished Masters Thesis, Iowa State University.

Rainville, Lynn 2014 Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville.

Sims, Katrina Rochelle 2016 Take the Mountain: The International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor and the Black Health Care Initiative in the Mississippi Delta, 1938-1983, Unpublished dissertation, The University of Mississippi.