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all that wondering on your behalf I know there are a lot of OLD cemeteries in my area and have seen/visited some just to see them. There are many in some state of disrepair for sure and kind of sad to think that at some point they were well maintained by a family near a homestead all of the members long ago forgotten and the family farm broken up and turned into subdivision or overgrown weedy plots along side a corporate mega farm...
Mark
One property we looked at that had a cemetery in the middle of the most usable part of the parcel. The cemetery was located that we could easily give access to any surviving family members without impacting our use but the location of the cemetery limited our use of the land too much. Twas very sad to see how many babies and children were buried in the cemetery. It was a pretty large family cemetery, I would guess 30 or so graves with most of the dead being under 12.
We say another small cemetery on a nice parcel that was just too far out for us and there was a house about 100 years old on the place. The neighbor was running cattle and he had a piss poor fence that cattle had broke through and they went through the cemetery and tore the place up.
The cattle knocked over some tomb stones and broke them. The tomb stones were made from thin local sandstone. The names and dates were barely scratched on the rock and hard to read. The person marking the tomb stones was either illiterate and/or dyslexic since some of the letter were written backwards. Marking that tomb stone took some work. Some of the dead had died in the early/mid 1700s. :shocked: Today this place is still fairly remote. It was really remote in the mid 1700s and I would think those homesteaders still had to worry Indian raids back then.
I know of two cemeteries located in large subdivisions. I think this bothered some people but I always figured the cemetery would make a good, quiet neighbor. :laughing::laughing::laughing:
Once upon a time I was on a canoe trip in the middle of no where Down East. There was some land half way through the trip that we had permission on which to camp. The trip was 20-30 miles and for much of that distance one or both sides of the river were owned by the Cone family. There was a small dirt road next to the camp site and after we had setup camp and eaten people started to go for a walk on the road. Some of the walkers found an old cemetery and late at night we decided to go see the cemetery. :confused3::laughing::laughing::laughing: It just happened to be around Halloween and there was a full moon rising over the river. :shocked:
The old dirt road was only a single track and it was mostly sugar sand. In front of the cemetery was a green road sign marking the location of the graves. The cemetery was buried in the woods and not visible from the road at all. The cemetery was very small and had a wall of cement block built around the graves with an metal gate. There was a large monument for the first couple buried into the cemetery. They were a young couple who lived through the Late Unpleasantness and they died towards the end of the 1800s. What was sad, yet interesting, was that you could see how the family fortune declined through the generations from the grave markers. The oldest marker was a tall stone monument 5-6 feet tall. With each passing generation, the markers got smaller and cheaper until the last ones were the small, cheap metal markers.
When I was younger, my dad and I used to go camping on Forest Service roads in the NE GA mountains. I assume these roads are all blocked off now. We would get way back in the mountains on these trails and we would often find small family cemeteries along these tracks. The vast majority of the graves had no markers at all though I remember one that had a nice, large granite stone. The buried person died in the early 1920s. I would bet very few people had ever seen that grave yard, there were maybe 6-8 graves, and danged few had seen them since that last marker was placed. Now, I would guess the road has grown over and that grave yard is lost in the mountains. Kinda sad that the family moved and/or died off loosing the connection to their family.
Later,
Dan
