The cemetery has been kept up. It is small with only five markers inside of a wire fence. The cemetery name at one time was listed as Granbury but is currently listed as Clayton Cemetry. Everyone who has lived in the Smith community for any length of time calls the cemetery by the name of Granbury, not Clayton. No one seems to know where that name came from. The seven graves that are inside the fenced area are part of the Granbury/Granberry Cemetery.
In 1846, Hiram Granberry's family moved to Brownsville a small community located on the old Bolton-Cox Ferry Road about 8 miles north of Bolton. Norval Granberry was now the pastor at Beulah Baptist Church which was first organized in 1831 as Spring Hill Baptist Church. In 1842, the congregation built a small log house a few hundred yards west of the current modern church. So his family could live close to the church, Norval bought land from Archibald Clark and his wife which was located a few miles north of Brownsville in Madison County near Bogue Chitto Creek. It was not a town but a small dispersed community of farms that tilled the rich alluvial bottom lands of the Big Black River. The Granberry farm was located just south of the junction of Bogue Chitto Creek and Spring Creek at the intersection of modern Purvis Road and Spring Creek Road. The old Granberry Cemetery still stands a short distance from the Spring Creek Road, hidden in the woods, marking the location of the farm house which stood on the back edge of the property. A narrow plantation road ran in front of the cemetery partially following the course of the modern Spring Creek Road except for visages of the original trace which can still be seen wandering off through the woods as the lane turned west toward the Cox Ferry road. Norval Granberry was soon joined by his brother George who bought land near Bogue Chitto Creek after the death of their father Loammi in Shubuta. With George Granberry were his two daughters Carey J. and Ella J.
Please remove any trash you see from the cemetary. Thanks.
