Obit – Mr. Harold Bennett
A well-known, lifelong and respected farmer, Mr. Harold Bennett, has died at the age of 85 at his Bellwood Community farm home surrounded by his loving family. He was pronounced deceased at 6:17 a.m. Wednesday morning March 12, 2025.
His longtime former pastor, Eld. James Thomas Gibbs, officiated at the 3 p.m. Friday afternoon March 14th funeral services from the Carthage Chapel of Sanderson Funeral Home. Burial followed in the Bennett-Pettross family lot in section two of the Ridgewood Cemetery alongside his parents and grandparents.
He was born Harold Edgar Bennett in the Horseshoe Bend Community of Smith County on January 27, 1940 and was the son of the late Adron Allen Bennett who died October 15, 1981 at the age of 65 and Bessie Mai Pettross Bennett who died February 2, 2002 at the age of 87.
Mr. Bennett was a member of the 1957 graduating class at Smith County High School in Carthage where he majored in agriculture, a class he participated in all four years of high school and where he served as the sentinel his freshman and senior year, treasurer the sophomore year, reporter his junior year as a member of the F.F.A. He was also a member of the Spanish club his senior year and the freshman year he was a member of the band, science club and camera club.
A statement made of him by his classmates in the ’57 annual was; “To know him is to like him”.
Mr. Bennett loved the land and was a farmer in the Horseshoe Bend Community until the construction of the Cordell Hull Dam which began in 1963 and the Cordell Hull Lake impounded in the Spring of 1973. This forced the Bennett family to vacate the land Harold loved so dearly. The family purchased a large farm on Old Rome Pike in the Bellwood Community and there he would live his remaining days continuing his love for the land.
He was a member of the Wilson County Co-op and the Smith County Farm Bureau.
An important milestone in his life was when he was saved at the age of 13 and was baptized into the full fellowship of the Green Valley Missionary Baptist Church in the Horseshoe Bend Community by the late Eld. Phocian Gibbs and where he remained a faithful member in attendance as long as his health permitted.
Surviving is son and daughter-in-law Matt Spurlock and Heather Turnbull Spurlock and their two children Case Sullivan and M. J. Spurlock all of the Bellwood Community; special caregivers, Catlin Gibson and Rebecca Raines.
The Spurlock family has requested memorials be made in Mr. Bennett’s memory to his beloved Green Valley Missionary Baptist Church.
SANDERSON of CARTHAGE
