Kent Family Cemetery
Livingston District, Spotsylvania County, Virginia
Compiled by Kathleen Payne Colvin

The Kent Family Cemetery was set apart from the farm land by Warner David Kent in 1854. It was necessary because he and his wife had a stillborn baby shortly after their arrival at their new home and there was need of a burial place. The grave was marked with a mound of dirt and a field stone. Time passed and all went well until the Civil War occurred.

During the Battle of Todd's Tavern many soldiers from both armies fell wounded and dead in the front field of Warner David Kent's property. Nine soldiers, seven Confederate and two Yankee, were buried in the Kent Cemetery. After 1865 when Clara Barton and others came through trying to identify the dead and they exhumed the bodies. Two had Yankee identification and their bodies were carried to the Spotsylvania County Confederate Cemetery and re-interred there. The other bodies were badly decomposed and after determining they had no identification, but from their uniforms believed to be Confederates, Warner David Kent gave permission to put them back in their graves in the Kent Cemetery.

After the death of Warner David Kent in 1906, his grandson, William Lee Kent, took loving care of the cemetery until his death in 1949. William Lee Kent had the cemetery deeded as such in 1949 and the deed is recorded at Spotsylvania Court House in the Clerk's office. William's son, John Samuel Kent, bought the Kent home place after William's death and cared for the upkeep of the cemetery for several years and later decided to sell the property to out of state owners and during their ownership the white paling fence that William Lee Kent had installed was removed and the cemetery was neglected from lack of right of way. Again the property was put up for sale and bought by Clinton Payne and Paul McKinney who turned the Kent farm into Olde Kent Subdivision. The cemetery upkeep was neglected from the time of John Samuel Kent's passing in 1964 until the year 2006.

In 1975 a fifth generation descendant granddaughter of Warner David Kent, Doris Colvin Gregory, and her husband bought lots in the Olde Kent Subdivision and one of them adjoined the Kent Cemetery property.

When one of their children, Daniel Lee Gregory, became terminally ill, he requested that he wanted his body to be interred there. Instead his family decided to open the Gregory Cemetery in April 2006 at another location on the property.

It was at this time that Donald Franklin Colvin, a fifth generation grandson of Warner David Kent, was helping to establish the Gregory Cemetery that he expressed concern about how overgrown and neglected the Kent Cemetery had become. It was at this time that the current Kent Cemetery was fenced in and a 24x36 inch bronze plaque erected in memory of those remains interred in the cemetery. The graves are unmarked except for field stones at the head of some of the graves of the family members and field stones at the foot of the unknown soldiers' graves.