On The Mark

They buried you at home. In the days before big cemeteries festooned with engraved markers and fountains, you were laid to rest in a corner of the farm. The small burial plots were usually surrounded by a simple rail fence or an unmortared stone wall to keep the cows out. In recent times, a family plot might be demarcated by a low chain-link fence. Engraved headstones were expensive and engravers hard to find, so frequently the stones were unadorned chips of native rock or simply wooden crosses, the latter of which would be quickly lost to decay and the former would have no information about the persons in repose.

People liked to be buried on high points, facing East, so the family plots were frequently on a hill overlooking the farm and the valley below. The people doing hardscrabble farming in the Blue Ridge Mountains were no exception, which is why the Blue Ridge Parkway is peppered with little graveyards from just before mile 2 all the way past mile 298. There may be more, but the Park Service isn’t through counting and heaven knows how many solitary graves or small plots have been lost to the ravages of time. What we do know is that in 2015, a team from the NPS mapped the locations of 51 cemeteries and recorded the graves in 42 of them (541 graves). Those sepulchers hold the remains of everyone from Revolutionary War veterans to an NYC firefighter lost September 11th.

Most people riding the Blue Ridge take little notice of the plots, as they tend to blend into the bucolic scenery. Stopping at cemeteries isn’t something most people do, but there are some who study history that way - they’re called “taphophiles.” I do not count myself as one: I usually confine my cemetery visits to the graves of historic notables. However, I recently had the occasion to go a very short distance over a long period on a beautiful day on the Parkway, so I stopped around mile 136 to photograph some cows and a convenient parking place was by the Shaver Cemetery. The Shaver plot is one of the larger ones, surrounded by a low block wall whose top is decorated with mortared-in, native stones of mostly quartz. It had both faded and modern stones, but none of them told me a compelling story.

That changed around mile 142, when I stopped at a little six-stone cemetery roughly outlined by a low, decaying rail fence. For some reason, this plot beckoned me and, having only six headstones to peruse, I stopped. A small wooden signed proclaimed the little gravel pulloff as a “private road.” The plot is named for the Wilson family, whose patriarch, Jonas, was born in 1887 and lived to age 65. Jonas’ stone by itself did not tell a compelling story, but that began to change when I went to the next. Mrs. Wilson, whose name was engraved “Mellawalka,” was born in ’87 too. I was bemused by the unusual name for a woman, but the humor only lasted a moment, because the next four stones whispered a story that broke my heart. It started in 1921.

In the early part of the 20th century, most births of country folk took place in the home. My own father was born in 1924 in a house in West Virginia. On a farm high up on 1920’s Blue Ridge dirt roads, there certainly wasn’t a hospital close by and probably not a doctor who could respond with any alacrity (my grandfather died in ‘25 when a train blocked his path to help). Jonas and Mellawalka Wilson might have been lucky to have the services of a midwife. Prenatal care might have been Jonas picking up a few more household chores, but probably not. Nutrition was what they could afford or grow and even the idea of an ultrasound was a half century away. Mellawalka wouldn’t have known the condition or sex of her unborn offspring…or how many there might be.

7 August 1921 must have been a grievous day for the Wilsons, because the mason who engraved the two headstones didn’t even know the sex of the stillborn twins, so “Infant Child” was all he could muster, along with the date. I can only imagine the anguish of the 34-year-old expectant parents - older than most in the mountains. I went back and looked at Mellawalka’s stone again, prepared to see the same date since women frequently died in childbirth, especially difficult ones, but she lived to 63.

As if that wasn’t sad enough, there were two more stones with a story to whisper, that of another set of twins who also died at birth on 7 March 1926. At least the mason could inscribe the names of Everett and Hettie to them. Jonas and Mellawalka would have been the ripe old age of 39 and again, she dodged the bullet of dying in the delivery. There were no other stones, so I can only assume that the two sets of stillborn twins were all the Wilsons were able to muster. What a solitary life it must have been for them over the next twenty-odd years.

I left the Wilsons to their rest, wishing a Scout would come along and make restoration of their failing fence an Eagle Project (it was replaced over 9 years ago). I don’t know if all the cemeteries of the Blue Ridge Parkway have histories as sad and compelling as the one of the Wilsons at mile 142. Knowing the Ridge and the challenges of life there, I suspect many of them do, but not being a taphophile, I don’t intend to find out. I will, however, ride the Parkway with a newfound awareness of the whispering stones and the stories they have to tell.