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Sumner Descendants Honor Ancestor At Tombstone Dedication

Tribune photo by FRED BELLET

Anthony, 10, and Shayla Mills, 15, release two doves during the tombstone dedication for Jesse Carey Sumner. The children's grandmother is the great, great, great granddaughter of Jesse and Caroline Sumner.

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By KEVIN WIATROWSKI

kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com

Published: February 21, 2009

DADE CITY - The evidence of Jesse Sumner's presence in Pasco County is everywhere, from the names of streets to the names of thousands of people descended from him.

Until last year, though, no one could say exactly where Sumner, one of Dade City's earliest citizens, was buried.

The question gnawed at Brian Sumner for two decades.

"Twenty years of research, and we finally found his grave last year," said Sumner, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel from Okaloosa County.

Brian Sumner is the great-grandchild of Jesse Sumner, who fought in the third Seminole Indian War in the 1850s while settling what was then the frontier.

Jesse Sumner's descendants gathered this morning at the city cemetery on the east side of town to remember their Georgia-born progenitor.

Two new marble headstones marked the side-by-side graves of Jesse Sumner and his wife, Caroline Hall Sumner. Jesse Sumner's stone came from the federal Department of Veterans Affairs. Family members raised money for Caroline's.

"If there was a way for Jesse and Caroline to be looking down from Heaven, I'm sure they'd be happy to see us all here," Susan McMillan Shelton told the dozens of relatives who assembled for the service. They sat on folding chairs surrounded by earlier generations of their family.

According to Shelton, Jesse Sumner was born on an east Georgia plantation in the second decade of the 19th century. As a young man, he struck out for Florida, drawn by the promise of building his fortune by capturing the wild cattle left behind by Spanish settlers a century before.

Sumner and people like him came to be known as "crackers" for the sound of the whips they used to round up the cattle.

Sumner settled first in the Clay Sink area near the Withlacoochee River in what is now far northeast Pasco County. Conflicts when the Seminole Indians forced him north to Ocala for a time. It was there he met and married Caroline Hall, a decade or so his junior.

Eventually the couple and their burgeoning family – they had 11 children in all – settled in the Dade City area along River Road. Jesse Sumner's two brothers also settled in the area.

When he died in 1871, Jesse Sumner was one of the first people buried in the cemetery where his relatives gathered nearly 140 years later to honor him.

Grave markers for Jesse and Caroline Sumner vanished long ago, leaving behind the mystery of their graves' locations.

That mystery was solved after Brian Sumner met his distant cousin Susan Shelton through a message posted at the Pioneer Florida Museum just north of town.

Over two years, and with the help of a grave dowser – a person who finds graves the way a stick-wielding water dowser finds underground water - they tracked down the spot they believe Jesse and Caroline were laid to rest.

For Brian Sumner, today's ceremony fulfilled a quest that was partly about finding an ancestor and partly about learning more about himself.

"I don't know why some people care about their roots, and some don't," Sumner said. "It's wonderful to understand your history."

Reporter Kevin Wiatrowski can be reached at (813) 948-4201 or kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com.

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