Appalachian History Series – Rest Haven Cemetery: Harlan County’s Community Burial Ground
On the road out of Harlan toward Keith and Baxter in Harlan County, a hillside of marble and granite rises above Kentucky Highway 840. Locals simply call it Resthaven, and for many families it is the place where several generations come together in stone. Modern mapping entries fix the cemetery at 3000 Kentucky State Highway 840 near the small community of Keith, with GPS coordinates that place it on a ridge above the valley of the Cumberland River.
Online cemetery indexes and driving directions treat Resthaven Cemetery as a landmark. One national cemetery database lists thousands of memorials there and notes that an earlier African American burying ground, known as Pleasant Hill and later Hill Crest, crowns the hill above the modern gate. Another index of veterans’ burials assigns Resthaven its own entry under “RESTHAVEN CEMETERY (KEITH, KY), HARLAN, KY 40831,” a reminder that the hillside holds soldiers from multiple wars as well as coal miners, teachers, and factory workers.
From the road, visitors see only a fraction of the story. Resthaven began life not as a private cemetery but as a county project at the end of the 1920s, when local officials went looking for a place to bury the poorest residents of the valley.
A county purchase for the poor
The most detailed surviving account of Resthaven’s beginnings comes not from a cemetery record book but from a court case. In 1933 the Kentucky Court of Appeals decided Harlan County v. Howard, a dispute between the county and Dr. E. M. Howard that turned on how the fiscal court had handled land purchases and debts. Because the judges needed to reconstruct exactly what the county had done, the opinion reproduced key parts of the fiscal court minutes from late 1929 and early 1930.
Those minutes show the court meeting in special session on the last day of 1929. Magistrates voted to buy 1,827 cemetery lots from Dr. Howard at three dollars each, a purchase of 5,481 dollars. The order described the land as lots at “Rest Haven Cemetery” and specified that the new ground would serve as a “county colored and white pauper graveyard,” language that captured both the racial segregation of the era and the decision to create one county managed burial place for the very poor.
The next day the clerk entered the order in the order book, and the county judge accepted a general warranty deed from Dr. Howard for the Rest Haven lots. The opinion notes that the judge directed the clerk to issue a county warrant for the purchase price, payable from the 1930 county levy. In practical terms, this made Rest Haven a public project. The county committed tax money to secure specific burial space for people who died without means or without family able to pay for a private plot.
Because the case turned on procedure, not on the cemetery itself, the appellate court did not dwell on the hillside or the people buried there. Yet for historians those quoted minutes and orders are crucial. They confirm Rest Haven’s founding moment at the turn of 1930, identify Dr. E. M. Howard as the seller, and preserve the exact phrase that county officials used to describe the new ground’s purpose.
Behind the court record lie local documents that still wait in courthouse vaults. The original fiscal court minute books for December 31, 1929 and January 1, 1930 should preserve the handwritten text that the clerk later copied into the order book. The general warranty deed from Howard to the county, likely recorded in the Harlan County deed books early in 1930, would show the metes and bounds of the cemetery lots and perhaps an earlier history of the land. These archival traces, together with the court opinion, anchor Resthaven in Harlan County’s official paper trail.
From pauper burying ground to community cemetery
Rest Haven began as a county pauper graveyard, but the records quickly show it becoming something broader. Kentucky death certificates from the mid twentieth century list “Rest Haven Cemetery, Harlan, Kentucky” as a place of burial for people whose families were not necessarily poor. The Harlan Miners Memorial Monument project, which compiles coal mine death records from across the county, includes several entries where bodies were removed from company towns or remote hollows and taken to “Rest Haven Cemetery, Emerling, Harlan Co., Ky.” for burial.
Obituaries tell the same story. Funeral notices for Harlan County residents describe teachers, store owners, office workers, and homemakers laid to rest at Resthaven. In some cases the service was held at a local church or funeral home with interment in a specific section of the cemetery. In others, families chose graveside services at the Resthaven chapel overlooking the valley. Together those notices reveal that within a generation the hillside had become the default burying ground for many people in and around the city of Harlan, whether or not they ever needed county assistance.
Genealogical platforms deepen the picture. Cemetery category pages on WikiTree group profiles under “Resthaven Cemetery, Keith, Kentucky,” linking individual life stories to specific plots at the site. User contributed photographs on FamilySearch and similar sites show headstones such as Anna Mae Seals’ marker, tagged to Resthaven and dated decades apart. These images function as primary visual records for families who may never have seen the stones in person but want to verify birth and death dates or inscriptions.
Even the business listings treat the cemetery as a standing institution. Funeral home directories and cemetery guides describe Resthaven as a small cemetery business at 3000 Highway 840 in Baxter, with a founding date around 1929 and a staff counted in single digits. The language hints that somewhere on the hilltop, or in a caretaker’s office, there may be plot maps and lot books documenting who purchased which section of the original 1,827 county lots and how the cemetery expanded as private burials multiplied.
Veterans, miners, and public life written in stone
Because Resthaven grew into a community cemetery, it also became a place where Harlan County’s public service and military histories converge. Databases compiled from United States Department of Veterans Affairs records list dozens of veterans buried there. Entries include men such as James Adams, identified as a United States Army staff sergeant who served in World War II and Vietnam and whose burial place is given as “RESTHAVEN CEMETERY, 3000 KENTUCKY STATE HWY 840, BAXTER, KY 40806.” Other listings record airmen and soldiers from the Korean War and later conflicts, each tied back to the same hillside.
The Harlan Miners Memorial compilation connects Rest Haven to the county’s industrial tragedies. Death certificates for miners killed in explosions, roof falls, and haulage accidents frequently state that their bodies were carried from company camps or hospitals to Rest Haven for burial. The pattern suggests that the cemetery became a central resting place for families uprooted by mine closures and relocations, who might no longer have access to small family plots on company property or in remote hollows.
Political histories point in the same direction. A specialized directory of burial places for American officeholders lists Resthaven as the cemetery for figures such as Will Ward Duffield, an early twentieth century political leader, and members of the Brock family, whose service in the Kentucky General Assembly shaped Harlan County’s mid century politics. Their graves tie courthouse history directly to the physical landscape of the cemetery.
Walk through Resthaven today and those stories blend together. Veterans’ markers with bronze service plaques stand near miners’ headstones engraved with coal cars or pickaxes. Family plots contain both public officials and relatives who never held office but kept households running while others campaigned or served overseas. The hillside holds a cross section of the county’s civic life in a way that few other single places can match.
A Revolutionary War veteran’s final journey
The most widely publicized burial at Resthaven came in 2017, when a Revolutionary War soldier long associated with Harlan County was moved there for what local officials said would be the last time. Private Samuel Howard, sometimes recorded as Samuel Hord Howard, had served in the Virginia Line during the American Revolution and was remembered in local tradition as a witness to the British surrender at Yorktown. After the war he settled in what would become Harlan County with his wife Chloe, and when he died in 1840 he was buried on family land.
In the twentieth century the family graves were relocated to the Wix Howard Cemetery above Loyall, near a deep cut where the United States Army Corps of Engineers reshaped the Cumberland River cut-through at Loyall as part of a flood control project. Over time that cut undermined the hill. By 2016 an erosion scar had crept within a short distance of Howard’s grave, prompting descendants and county officials to ask the Corps to intervene.
News reports and the Corps’ own statements describe how federal engineers committed several million dollars to repair the slope and protect the cemetery. As part of the solution they arranged to exhume the remains of Samuel Howard, his wife, and their child and move them to safer ground. In November 2016 workers opened the graves at Wix Howard Cemetery under Corps oversight and prepared the remains for reburial at Resthaven.
On May 12, 2017, soldiers from the 3d U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) carried Howard’s flag draped casket up the hill at Resthaven during a formal reinterment ceremony. The official Army account notes that the event was meant to demonstrate the Army’s commitment to honor its soldiers in life and beyond, even centuries after their service. Photographs distributed through the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service and later archived by the National Archives show Old Guard pallbearers, color guards, and family members standing among Resthaven’s stones, with the Cumberland hills in the background.
Local television stations in eastern Kentucky covered the ceremony, interviewing descendants who spoke about seeing an ancestor’s grave rescued from a collapsing hillside and carried to a safer resting place. One report called Howard “the founder of Harlan County” and emphasized how important it was for residents to see his grave preserved rather than allowed to fall into the river. For Resthaven, the reinterment marked a moment when a cemetery originally laid out as a pauper ground became the setting for a nationally reported military rite.
Landscape, maps, and community memory
Because of its age and prominence, Resthaven appears in a wide range of maps and visual records. The U.S. Geological Survey assigns the cemetery a feature code and locates it precisely along Highway 840 near Keith, placing it among nearby communities like Rio Vista, Tremont, and Baxter. Funeral directory sites provide the same address and phone number, while GPS based navigation apps mark the cemetery as wheelchair accessible and open to visitors around the clock.
Photographers have also taken an interest in the hilltop. A 2010 image series by photographer Chris Porter on Flickr labels one frame “Resthaven Cemetery | Harlan County, KY” and shows a central tree and marker cluster that many local visitors would recognize. Informal video tours on YouTube walk viewers along the cemetery roads, describing Resthaven as Harlan’s largest and among its oldest cemeteries while panning across long rows of headstones.
Community conversations, especially in social media groups devoted to Harlan County genealogy and scenery, add another layer. Residents trade memories of visiting parents and grandparents at Resthaven, discuss the condition of older sections, and ask for contact information to arrange stone repairs or locate specific plots. Some posts describe infant markers that are now unreadable or family rows where only a few stones carry legible names. While these threads are not formal sources, they point researchers toward oral histories and on the ground concerns that rarely appear in official records.
Resthaven’s place in Harlan County history
Taken together, the legal paperwork, veterans’ indexes, miners’ memorials, political directories, and visual records all tell a consistent story. Resthaven began at the close of 1929 as a county effort to provide dignified burial space for the poor, funded from the public levy and recorded in fiscal court minutes and deeds. Within a few decades it had become the principal community cemetery for a wide swath of the Harlan valley, absorbing miners from company camps, soldiers from distant wars, courthouse leaders, journalists, and ordinary families who chose the hillside as their resting place.
The 2017 reinterment of Samuel Howard drew national attention to the cemetery. That ceremony, conducted by federal engineers and Army honor guards, highlighted how a graveyard carved out of a local court dispute could become the site where regional and national memory meet. At the same time, the daily flow of obituaries, family photographs, and social media stories shows that Resthaven’s meaning remains intensely local. For many Harlan County residents, the cemetery is where visits on Decoration Day, veterans’ flag placements, and quiet walks between rows keep family bonds alive.
For researchers, Resthaven offers a rich, layered archive written in stone and paper. Further work in courthouse minute books, deed records, death certificates, and any surviving cemetery lot books would deepen the picture of how the hillside changed from a county pauper ground into a shared memorial landscape. For families tracing their roots, the cemetery’s stones, photographs, and online indexes map a century of life and loss in one Appalachian valley.
Sources & Further Reading
Harlan County v. Howard, 246 Ky. 791, 56 S.W.2d 365 (Ky. Ct. App. 1933). vLex. https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/harlan-county-v-howard-890613674
United States Army Corps of Engineers, Nashville District. Loyall, Kentucky, Slope Failure Design Deficiency Draft Environmental Assessment. 2018. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Loyall%2C_Kentucky%2C_slope_failure_design_deficiency_environmental_assessment_-_USACE-p16021coll7-7127.pdf
United States Army. “Reinterment Demonstrates Army’s Commitment to Soldiers in Life and Beyond.” Army.mil, May 16, 2017. https://www.army.mil/article/187813/reinterment_demonstrates_armys_commitment_to_soldiers_in_life_and_beyond
Holmes, Nicholas T. “Old Guard Soldiers Lay Revolutionary War Veteran to Final Resting Place.” Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, May 18, 2017. https://www.dvidshub.net/news/234100/old-guard-soldiers-lay-revolutionary-war-veteran-final-resting-place
United States Army Corps of Engineers Nashville District. “Family Descendants and Media Observe the Reinterment of Revolutionary War Private Samuel Howard.” Flickr, 2017. https://www.flickr.com/photos/usace-nashville/sets/72157683036820516
“Resthaven Cemetery in Baxter, Ky.” United States National Archives image collection via GetArchive. https://www.getarchive.net/topics/resthaven+cemetery+baxter+ky
Associated Press. “Feds to Stop Revolutionary War Soldier’s Grave from Falling.” AP News, September 14, 2016. https://apnews.com/article/ff2d422e7b7a4d87b0e4f9c1b4fa1ed0
WYMT News Staff. “Corps of Engineers Agrees to Repair Historic Harlan County Cemetery.” WYMT, September 13, 2016. https://www.wymt.com/content/news/Corps-of-Engineers-agrees-to-repair-historic-Harlan-County-cemetery-393235091.html
WYMT News Staff. “177 Years Later, Revolutionary War Soldier Buried in Final Resting Place.” WYMT, May 12, 2017. https://www.wymt.com/content/news/177-years-later-Revolutionary-War-soldier-buried-in-final-resting-place-422141003.html
WKYT News Staff. “Graves Moved from Harlan County Cemetery Falling into River.” WKYT, November 21, 2016. https://www.wkyt.com/content/news/Graves-moved-from-Harlan-County-cemetery-falling-into-river-402332646.html
Guns.com Staff. “Revolutionary War Vet Reinterred with Full Military Honors.” Guns.com, May 17, 2017. https://www.guns.com/news/2017/05/17/revolutionary-war-vet-re-interred-with-full-military-honors
“Resthaven Cemetery, Keith, Harlan County, Kentucky, USA.” Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/75707/resthaven-cemetery
“Samuel Hord Howard II (1762-1840).” Memorial page, Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/235705245/samuel_howard
“Veterans Buried in Kentucky Cemeteries: RESTHAVEN CEMETERY (KEITH, KY), HARLAN, KY 40831.” Interment.net. https://www.interment.net/data/us/ky/harlan/resthaven/index.htm
“Category: Resthaven Cemetery, Keith, Kentucky.” WikiTree. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Resthaven_Cemetery,_Keith,_Kentucky
Kentucky GenWeb. “Harlan Miners Memorial Monument.” PDF listing of mine deaths and burial places. https://kygenweb.net/harlan/Mine%20Deaths%20From%20The%20Harlan%20Miners%20Memorial%20%20Monument.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Kentucky Death Records, 1911–1965.” Index description, Kentucky Vital Record Indexes. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Kentucky,_Vital_Record_Indexes_-_FamilySearch_Historical_Records
Kentucky Kindred Genealogy. “Turner and Howard Families of Harlan County and the Feud Between the Two.” October 6, 2023. https://kentuckykindredgenealogy.com/2023/10/06/turner-and-howard-families-of-harlan-county-and-the-feud-between-the-two
The Political Graveyard. “Cemeteries and Memorial Sites of Politicians in Harlan County, Kentucky.” https://politicalgraveyard.com/geo/KY/HR-buried.html
The Political Graveyard. “Brock Family of Harlan, Kentucky.” https://politicalgraveyard.com/families/13807.html
HomeTownLocator. “Resthaven Cemetery, Harlan, KY.” Kentucky Gazetteer, feature ID 5284. https://kentucky.hometownlocator.com/maps/tnm-feature-map%2Cn%2Cresthaven-cemetery-5284%2Cfcode%2C82010.cfm
iMortuary. “Resthaven Cemetery, 3000 Highway 840, Baxter, Kentucky 40854.” Baxter Funeral Homes and Cemeteries Directory. https://www.imortuary.com/funeral-homes/kentucky/baxter.php
Arkansas Connections. “Cemeteries and Headstones: Resthaven Cemetery, Keith, Harlan County, Kentucky.” https://www.arkansasconnections.com/cemeteries.php
Chris Porter. “Resthaven Cemetery | Harlan County, KY.” Photograph, 2010. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/cwporter/4799926231
“Harlan Kentucky’s Resthaven Cemetery.” YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ANsT9R9WU
“Walking Through Rest Haven Cemetery.” YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQNg743qQxU
London Funeral Home. “Edna Ruth Hendrickson.” Obituary and service information. https://www.londonfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Edna-Hendrickson
Anderson-Laws and Jones Funeral Home. “Dale Napier.” Obituary and graveside service at Resthaven Cemetery Chapel, Keith. https://www.aljfh.com/obituaries/dale-napier
Mount Pleasant Funeral Home. “Debbie Saylor Caldwell.” Obituary noting interment at Resthaven Cemetery. https://www.harlanobits.net/obituary/debbie-caldwell
Author Note: If you have a family story or a veteran’s service record tied to Rest Haven, reach out so we can add it to the living history of Harlan County.