King Cemetery #27 is located on Fort Benning, near Columbus, Georgia at 32°21’53.5″N 84°46’41.8″W. It is situated in their firing range, but you can contact the military installation and they will escort you to the cemetery. The drive to it will take you past Kings Pond and Upper Kings Pond, where Henry King had a water powered mill, through tall soaring pine trees. There are no signs of the many buildings and houses that used to be in the area.
Henry King died before the coming of Fort Benning, but his children sold their land to the government and the area that was the King Plantation is now used for military training exercises. This is a huge open wooded area, peaceful and quiet and seemingly untouched but for dirt roads as far as the eye can see.
The cemetery itself is maintained by the military, and sits atop a hill affording a magnificent view of the peaceful surroundings. There are four visible gravesites here; Henry King and Elizabeth King (nee Elizabeth Lee) have legible granite ledger stones, although they are worn and cracked. There is one unmarked grave next to them, and then a marble ledger stone with no legible inscription. This is very likely the gravesite of Jesse Stephen King, their youngest son who died in the Civil War.
Family stories tell that after Jesse’s death (from wounds at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain) his body was returned to the family. His mother dressed him in his uniform and buried him beneath an apple tree. Her heart was so broken by the death of her youngest child that she died a few years later, many years before her husband.
But come, we are too gay. What is it that glistens so white among the shrubbery of yonder high hill, past the woods, through the hollow, upon that lofty hill?
There they sleep, the young and the old, in neat rows, a stone at the foot and one at the head, waiting till Judgment Day.
Why is it so quiet there? Why do the winds sigh so mournfully? Why is it chilly there even in the sunlight?
There they sleep, like two giants at rest, with little ones around them—Henry King and his wife, Elizabeth Lee.
-Mrs. Mary Williamson Miller, from History of Chattahoochee County, Georgia by N. K. Rogers