Daniel B. Durbin

Mount Pleasant Cemetery is located in the northwest corner of Edmonson County, Kentucky near the borders of Grayson and Butler counties. The cemetery is adjacent to Mt. Pleasant Cumberland Presbyterian Church. The surrounding area is known as Big Reedy. Big Reedy is approximately 25 miles (40 km) due north of Bowling Green, or 13 miles south of Caneyville. Mt. Pleasant C. P. Church was established in 1887 and the first community schoolhouse was built in 1896. The schoolhouse still stands, unused since 1940. The cemetery was in use much earlier, during the settlement years. The oldest legible death date in the cemetery is 1848. Some of the 70+ field rocks serving as headstones no doubt pre-date this "earliest date" to the late 1700's and very early 1800's. There are 650 marked graves in Mt. Pleasant, 578 of which have legible tombstones. No doubt many original markers have been lost due to the ravages of time. There are at least 75 possible gravesites in the original old section (A) of the cemetery that are not marked. The wrought-iron fence and entry portal to Mount Pleasant Cemetery are gone. However the serenity and beauty of the hillside cemetery have not lessened. This index is a composite of a 1979 pen & paper survey and a 2014 photo survey. The 2014 survey assigned a Section, Row, and Plot number to each burial. This was done in an effort to assist in finding the individual grave of an ancestor.

My parents lived in Sunfish, Kentucky during my early years of childhood. I grew up at the "Susie House". This was a two room house, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no telephone, and without internet. We had a marvelous two-seater outhouse that served a family of 8 well. There were my parents, Ben and Gladys Durbin, plus six kids living in the two room Susie House. In today's world this would seem intolerable conditions, but at the time this was just the way things were. This book is the result of my curiosity of the story behind the Susie House; how it got its name, and the people involved and why my parents came to live there. The story quest triggered me to remember things that happened as I was growing up. At our family reunions invariably someone tells a "remember when" story of something that happened from childhood in Sunfish. I wanted to capture some of these incidents for posterity. It is impossible to capture all the memories, but the ones retold in this book help tell the story of what life was like at the Susie House. Oral traditions fade through the successive generations and many of our remembrances are lost through time. I have added my memories and those of my siblings recalling life at the Susie House and growing up in Sunfish, Kentucky. Appendix-A contains Deed Records dating to 1828. Appendix-b contains detailed genealogy charts and reports on Durbin and Anderson ancestors.