SUMTER COUNTY, Fla. – Decades after their deaths, John Fraser Shecut and his wife, Tommie E. Durdin Grady Shecut, were buried at Sumterville Cemetery
The Shecuts are part of Sumter County’s story, just not in this century or the last.
John Shecut died in 1893. He was originally laid to rest next to his wife in a grave site off of C.R. 470, just down the road from the cemetery where the couple was reinterred more than 130 years after his death.
“I just love the history of it,” said Marsha Perkins. “These two people had a very difficult life. I mean, they both came of age during the Civil War.”
Marsha Perkins said she has driven by the Shecut burial site hundreds of times, and she had no idea about the couple’s story or their significance. When she was asked to find out more about them, she started researching.
“Being a genealogist from way back it was right up my line,” Perkins said. “Just give me a computer and ancestry.com and I will find out something about people.”
Perkins found more than just “something.” She said John Shecut was born in 1838 in South Carolina. He enlisted during the Civil War and served as a private under Captain Barns Company 1 Georgia Infantry Confederate Army. Records show after the war, he took a reconstruction oath in 1868, and after his first wife and one of his children died during childbirth he got involved in newspapers.
“He was in Atlanta, you know, editing newspapers. He was in Richmond. He was all over in Central Georgia running newspapers. He just liked newspapers,” Perkins said.
Once Shecut remarried Tommie and moved to Florida, that’s when he founded the Sumterville Times.
“Today it is now the Sumter Sun Times, but it has been in continuous publication since 1881,” said Perkins. “That is quite an amazing feat.”
Last year, the Sumter County Board of County Commissioners gave their approval to move the graves from the original site on C.R. 470 to the Sumterville Cemetery. A report put together by the Sumter County Preservation Society Inc. states that Shecut is a “local figure of outstanding importance”, and the original gravesite is “not ideal for the continued care of it.”
“With the forward progress coming, we recognized a need to move,” said Commissioner Jeff Bogue. “We did it with every care and delicacy we could possibly do. We had archaeologists on site to make sure we did everything correctly from the University of Florida. I’m very pleased with the outcome.”
The Sumterville Cemetery donated the two grave spaces for the reinterment, and a team from the University of Florida assisted the county with the move to a more secure burial site.
Dr. Phoebe R. Stubblefield, a research assistant scientist, said “I and my team were honored to assist Sumter County in this respectful move of the Shecut family to a more secure burial location. We were asked to perform the recovery as opposed to any analysis or inventory of the remains and artifacts, but I can say that based on the casket hardware and personal effects we did observe, both Shecuts had been originally interred with care and respect.”
Perkins said the Shecuts were originally buried at the site next to C.R. 470 because it was their front yard.
“I really think John did not want to put Tommie away in a cemetery,” Perkins said. “He wanted her close by. So, he buried her literally right in their front yard, and after he died he was buried there beside her.”
At the new gravesite, the couple will now rest in a space that is front and center, close to the American flag. The original tombstone that John Shecut chose for his wife, Tommie, has also been moved to the cemetery, along with a military marker that was placed to honor John and his service years later in 1961.
“I’m honored to be a part of this. I think it is a very honorable thing to do for these two people,” Perkins said. “At some point in the future, these tombstones would’ve been gone, and these graves would’ve been paved over. I have no doubt. 100 years from now nobody would’ve ever heard of them and now I hope they make the history books.”
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