Friday, March 17, 2023
A Family Cemetery in Rural Maryland
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I was visiting a friend today who lives on a 25-acre property in a very rural area. She mentioned that there was a great old cemetery on the next property over; did I want to see it? Did I ever. It was a very gray day with occasional drizzle, perfect for visiting a graveyard, but it did make the photographs a bit dreary.
One of the fascinating things is the location, on a very steep little hill; and this is the coastal plain, where there aren't a lot of steep little hills. The cemetery hill is wooded, with at least a strip of plowed fields on every side.
There is a gigantic oak tree, and vinca covers the ground. (These are very good clues to the location of old cemeteries in this part of the world.)
The ornamental fence in the center seems to be a late addition, since it doesn't enclose most of the graves, including many of the landowning family.
There are about 20 carved stones, but a glance at the ground surface tells you that there are at least as many unmarked graves.
It was a wonderful little adventure, and it lifted my spirits after a blah week.
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About Me
- John
- John Bedell is an archaeologist, historian, and father of five living in Maryland. He has self-published two novels and is writing a third.
6 comments:
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2344092/memorial-search
Living in rural Virginia, there are small gravesites in many places. Like the middle of a pasture, in the front yard of a house, in the backyard of another, collapsed house. And that’s just the ones that have markers. Virginia law allows bodies to be buried quickly on one’s own land, as long as the local laws are OK with it.
Friends in Reedville VA (that's at the northeastern-most part of VA's Northern Neck) had a 19th century home on a "double lot" with a small graveyard (totally unrelated to them; they bought the house in the 1980s) on the land. They had an enormous problem selling the home and extra lot because of the graveyard. One sees them everywhere in rural VA, as Susi notes.
I was involved in a project a few years ago in which people buried a small cemetery under a couple of dumptruck loads of dirt before they sold the property to developers. This was discovered when an unidentified passer-by, seeing surveyors on the property, stopped and shouted out his car window that there were old graves behind the house. And there are, at least a dozen, two of them with big stone vault covers. I don't know what happens next; I'm just the archaeologist, not the lawyer, but it certainly looked like fraud to me.
@John
That's an amazing story. Sounds like the set=up for a novel, especially the line, "I'm just the archaeologist, not the lawyer." Oh how wrong the archaeologist turns out to be . . .
A property we loaned to our church for a manse had a family graveyard in front of it. Our Pastor’s first funeral was in her front yard. The family gave money each year to our tenants to keep up the graves. Small town Virginia.
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