Street's Ferry Cemetery (Street's/Kemp? Family Cemetery)

If anyone has researched the Street or Kemp family that lived in Craven County, I'm sure they wondered where these individuals were placed to rest. At the time it was the way of life in the south to either be buried at a church graveyard, city dedicated cemetery, or family burying ground at the farm.

A fews months ago I came across an obscure recording of a cemetery site. I say obscure because on occasion in the Craven County Cemetery Book Vol. 2 a cemetery will have no heading and will incidentally be placed incorrectly with another burial site, sometimes miles away. In this case at the end of reading about a cemetery on HWY 17, at the bottom of the page was a description for a cemetery located on the Weyerhaeuser plant at their (I assume recreational) ball field. It was a single record for a headstone of Sallie Street (1908).

The Weyerhaeuser (or International Paper) plant sits atop the former Street's farm that was attached onto the Street's ferry. This was a former plantation that was last operated by the Street's family before the civil war and continued farming operations up until being sold in the 1960s when Weyerhaeuser was built. Concurrently a new bridge across the Neuse River was constructed and replaced Street's Ferry. Oddly, that was not the first bridge constructed across the Neuse on the Street's property. Sometime in the early 1800s after Samuel Street acquired the property he erected a bridge there, and I believe it lasted around two decades. That is something I would like to know more about.

Anyway, back to Sallie Street. She was the wife of Stephen E. Street, who lived at the property all his life until the end of his life when he stayed with his nephew Duff Perry Street. When Stephen died in 1912 it is documented on his death certificate that he was buried at the Street's Ferry farm, presumably beside his wife. No marker survives for him, and I don't think his wife Sallie's marker survives either—I went to the cemetery site recently and nothing is visibly observable besides a tall white fence placed around where her marker did stand. Other Street family members did live on the farm too—Nat. H. Street Sr., Paxton, Oliver Perry Street, and Samuel Street's families all lived on the Street farm at one time or another.

It is probable some of these family members are buried there that do not have other known sites like Samuel Street—the Street's Ferry Patriarch. Possibly Samuel's wives Zilpha Heath and Sarah Willis, but they have other possible burial locations too. Possibly some of Nathaniel H. Street's children that died early in adolescence, but not any of his three wives as they have other known burial locations. Oliver Perry Street is another possible burial along with his two wives based on the current information I have on them. Certainly Stephen and Sallie (Sarah Dillahunt) Street are buried here.

Also note that before the Street family owned the plantation and ferry, it was held by several other owners, like John Spence West as mentioned in George Washington's diary during his Southern Tour, but the main one that owned it for nearly 2/3rds of the 18th century was the Kemp family. Three generations I believe—Matthias, Isaac, and John. I'm not sure they lived here but their estate files certainly dealt a lot with just the ferry and the farm attached to it. Then it was known as Kemp's Ferry. The Street family could had adopted a Kemp Family Cemetery as their own. It would not be the first case of a newly owned farm family using a previously unrelated family's burial ground.

Sometimes noted as a previous owner of this ferry site before the Kemp's is the Graves family. I'm not sure if this location was the area of Graves' Ferry. Look at Moseley's Map of 1733 and see Graves' Ferry being located below Bachelors Creek which is where other ferries have been over the years like Nelson's Ferry around the turn of the 20th century.

This is based a lot of memory of a post I planned on making when I was looking into this information three months ago, but got busy. I felt it needed to be posted and out there.