Cemeteries have always been an important part of my life. I bonded most with my grandmother when wandering through forests that had once been fields searching for a graveyard that contained the bones of a long lost relative. We never found the grave we were looking for but stumbled upon many other forgotten family plots deep in the woods.
At one point, we visited the cemetery in Old Sneedsborough, a town that once thrived along the banks of the Pee Dee River, but today is little more than a couple of chimneys in a field and a collection of tombstones in the woods. Dates on ornately carved stones remind us that prominent people once inhabited this almost forgotten corner of the world. The giant trees growing through their graves let us know that it’s been a very long time ago.
Later, I worked in Eastview Cemetery in Wadesboro as a groundskeeper. Our salary came from a trust funded by the families of the people buried there. The graveyard spans about twenty-five acres or so on the southeast corner of downtown. The oldest section dates back to the late 1700s.
Mr. Hampton Allen administered the trust and hired his grandson and me to keep the grass mowed and coping trimmed. He also would spend a few hours telling us about the families and people buried there. I learned much about the history of Wadesboro and Anson County listening to Mr. Hampton. I also got to know my own family better since my paternal grandparents and both sets of great-grandparents are spread across three plots in Eastview.
Today, the plot that holds my grandparents also contains the ashes of my brother, Eddie. Eddie enjoyed Christmas as much as anyone could and kept Santa Claus alive and well in our family until I was into my fifties. So, when we went to celebrate with my parents the day after Christmas, I thought it only appropriate to go visit Eddie and the rest of the family.
With my mother, my wife, my kids and a couple of cousins, we made sure that everybody was resting peacefully. We discussed our relations to people gone almost 100 years now. For me, I re-established ties to my ancestors, most of whom I never met but whose genes and stories have shaped me and my view of the world.
There was J.D. Mills, a man who looked like Colonel Sanders with a white goatee and glasses, who built a distillery in the days before Prohibition. When making liquor was outlawed, J.D. bought a hotel in downtown Wadesboro to sell his wares instead of shutting down his business. In the Fetzer plot lies Lomie Goodson Fetzer, called “Little Mother” because of her physical stature, whose father was killed at Gettysburg when she was only nine months old. Their kids, Fred Moore Mills and Zeta Fetzer, eloped shortly after World War I because the Fetzers, a family of preachers, didn’t approve of their daughter marrying into a family of bootleggers.
I wanted to go to Savannah Church down by the Pee Dee River to visit Burrell and Tabitha Mills, J.D.’s parents, but the light was too low and we needed to head home. I’ll take my children there someday soon. I want them to feel just a little bit of the connection that binds me to this place and these people.
Faulkner famously said of the South, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” For me, cemeteries and their inhabitants embody that sentiment. Maybe my children will escape that reality but I live with it every day, now more than ever.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
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Thomas, our Mills family also spends time in Cemeteries and I see a few more leads to follow from the names you mentioned. Meanwhile, I send holiday greetings to you and your family and look forward to working with you in 2017 for a more just and peaceful North Carolina.
I also have an interest in cemeteries and all things historical. A month before he died of cancer, my Uncle Fred took me to an area less than a mile from the Moores Creek Battlefield, where my grandmother was born and raised, by the Cape Fear River. There, he showed me a private family cemetery with just a few deceased family members in it, including a small infant who never made it. It dates from the Civil War era. He signed the cemetery over to me. Now I own a cemetery! It’s cool to own a cemetery, but I’m not sure of the next step. Anyway, I plan to someday take my grandchildren to view this treasure and share with them the same amazing story about their ancestors during the War. And by the way, all of my ancestors on my dad’s side were from this swampy area, just west of Wilmington.
Thomas, cemeteries have played a great deal in my whole life–whether my own family or Steve’s. I grew up in Ashe County where family members are buried in family cemeteries with upkeep done by various cousins. In my mother’s family cemetery lies my grandparents, great grandparents, great-great grandparents as well as cousins & in-laws–my great-great grandfather fought in the Civil War. At my father’s cemetery are my parents, brother, uncles, aunts, grandparents, great aunts, & cousins. And the prior ancestors are buried at an older cemetery on a higher ridge with no road that my brother routinely cleared off and maintained. Highlights of my August include traveling to Ashe County, through West Jefferson on through Warensville and Lansing, up Big Horse Creek to the extreme tip of Ashe closest to Tennessee & Virginia. to decorations at these cemeteries, spreading the graves with flowers, singing hymns, hearing remarks from a cousin who is a preacher, and mingling with cousins from throughout NC, Va, and Penn. My children and grandchildren have grown up with these traditions.
When i married Steve, I had no idea of the history of his family. But we live on land that has been in the Wells family since before the Revolutionary War, bought as a land grant by the original John Wells from the King of England in pounds and schillings. The wounded from the Oct 7th, 1780 Battle of Kings Mountain were carried to John’s second cabin under construction and treated there. The original Wells cemetery is in a neighboring field where the two oldest generations of Wells are buried. Then the family moved to the cemetery at Antioch Baptist Church, Antioch Community , SC, but near Grover, NC, where the last three generations are buried. Instead of yearly decorations as the Hart family does in Ashe, the Wells Family gathers at the church in our community the last Sunday in April for a family reunion which features good food, family documents, family history, and culminating with a visit to the original Wells Cemetery. Again our children and grandchildren have grown up knowing this family history. The last reunion garnered descendants from NC, SC, Louisiana, and Kentucky.
Again thank you, Thomas, for your post which struck a cord within my heart. Happy New Year!!
I feel the same way about cemeteries. Both sides of my family migrated down the Philadelphia Wagon Road to the Catawba Valley in the 1740’s and, to my knowledge, I am one of the few to cross over and settle on the east side of the Catawba River or the west side of the Blue Ridge (for a little bit) in 275 years. My family got caught up in the Second Great Awakening and became Methodists. The church is still there and its cemetery holds the remains of most of my maternal ancestors since that time. I attend Decoration Day at the church every first Sunday in June. I don’t care what people do with or about me when I die, but they better scatter part of me in that cemetery unless they want me to be a “haint” and bother the living for a good long time into the future.