Stone Gardens Desolate cemetery northeast of Alma contains dozens of abandoned grave sites

 Benjamin Sater “Ben” Dyer Jr.

Ben Dyer Cemetery, located on isolated Faith Road northeast of Alma in Crawford County, is one of the older historic burial grounds in western Arkansas. It sits in what was once the Turner community near Little Mulberry Creek, on land originally owned by the Dyer family.

The cemetery is now heavily overgrown with vegetation, reflecting years of limited maintenance in a remote spot, yet it holds dozens of graves, including many early settlers and multiple generations of the prominent local Dyer family.

The cemetery is named for Benjamin Sater “Ben” Dyer Jr. (February 29, 1832 – September 7, 1907), a longtime farmer, stock raiser, distiller, and community figure whose family played a foundational role in the area’s pioneer history.

Benjamin Sater Dyer Jr. was born on Leap Day 1832 in Monroe County, East Tennessee, near the Tennessee River. He was just a few weeks old when his parents, Benjamin Sater Dyer Sr. (1798–1835, born in Ashe County, North Carolina) and Martha “Patsy” Pogue Dyer (1806–1882), brought the family to Crawford County. At the time, the region was a vast wilderness filled with wild animals, game, and Native American presence.

His father worked as a farmer, blacksmith, and distiller, (basically a moonshiner) and died young in 1835. His mother remarried and lived until 1882. The extended family, with roots tracing back through North Carolina and Virginia lines, helped settle this part of Arkansas in the 1830s.

Young Ben had limited formal education due to frontier life but gained knowledge through self-effort. He grew up amid the challenges of pioneer existence.

Ben Dyer married twice. First, on December 16, 1851, to Mary Ann Eatherly (a Tennessee native). She died in 1858 or 1859, leaving two sons and a daughter. In 1859, he married Serviller Jane “Siller” Turner (1842–1897), daughter of Sudeth D. and Sarah Turner.

They had ten children, with several surviving to adulthood.

Children included William Jasper Dyer, Rev. Leonard Dyer, Frank Dyer, Martha “Patsy” Dyer Blevins, and others. Several infant and child graves in the cemetery underscore the harsh realities of the era.

Ben owned significant land, including the site of the future cemetery. For about 29 years he lived on Little Mulberry, farming around 180 acres. He worked as a blacksmith early on, then engaged in fruit distilling from 1860 onward.

He served as justice of the peace from 1864 to 1866 and was a public-spirited citizen. Politically, he started as a Democrat but became a Republican after the war. He belonged to the Masonic fraternity and he and his wives were active Baptists.

During the Civil War, in 1864 he served in the 13th Kansas Infantry as a quartermaster, stationed at Van Buren and Fort Smith.

Benjamin Sater Dyer Jr. died on September 7, 1907, at age 75 in Graphic, Crawford County.

He is buried in the cemetery that bears his name. His second wife Serviller and many descendants are also interred there, making it a true family burial ground.

The site contains some of the oldest graves in western Arkansas, tying directly to the Dyer family’s pioneer land ownership on what became Faith Road.

Ben Dyer Jr. was not the person after whom the town of Dyer, Arkansas, was named. That community was platted in 1884 by George Dyer and John Moss and developed around earlier Dyer family activities in that specific area.

The overgrown condition of Ben Dyer Cemetery highlights ongoing challenges for preserving remote historic sites in rural Arkansas. It holds memorials for early families like the Bridges, Berna, Gearharts, and especially the Dyers—serving as a tangible link to 19th-century settlement, farming life, the Civil War era, and multi-generational family roots in the River Valley.