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A Family Tree Marks Its Roots

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By KEVIN WIATROWSKI

kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com

Published: February 25, 2009

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

Until last year, though, no one could say exactly where Sumner, one of Dade City's earliest residents, 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 Air Force lieutenant colonel from Okaloosa County.
Brian Sumner is the great-grandchild of Jesse Sumner, who fought in the Third Seminole War in the 1850s while settling what then was the frontier.

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

Two new marble headstones mark the side-by-side graves of Jesse Sumner and his wife, Caroline Hall Sumner. Jesse Sumner's stone came from the 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 the family.

Shelton said 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 a 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 now is far northeast Pasco County. Conflicts with 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 - 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, creating 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 is said to find graves the same way a stick-wielding water dowser is said to find groundwater - they tracked down the spot where they think Jesse and Caroline were buried.

For Brian Sumner, Saturday'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.

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