Coon Dog Cemetery, near Cherokee AL

Av and I visited the Coon Dog Cemetery while we were in the Florence area a few days ago.

The cemetery began in 1937 when Key Underwood buried his dog Troop there. Some other men asked if they, too, could bury their coon dogs on the land, and this started the ‘Coon Dog Cemetery’. The cemetery website states that there are more than 185 coon dogs buried there now.

This is from their website:

When columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson interviewed Underwood in 1985, he told her that a woman from California wrote him wanting to know why he didn’t allow other kinds of dogs to be buried at the coon dog cemetery.

“You must not know much about coon hunters and their dogs, if you think we would contaminate this burial place with poodles and lap dogs,” he responded.