Over the past 10 days or so I have found myself at cemeteries, multiple times. Now, considering my line of work, that should not surprise most people. I once had a lady in St. Louis tell me that at 84, her social life revolved around doctors’ appointments and funeral homes. I was laughing, but she was serious. I am only in my 60s, but I have a much better appreciation for what she was saying now than I did 20 years ago.
Now having shared my age and the fact that I bury the dead, I want to share a conversation that I had this summer with a complete stranger. About a month ago I saw a pick up truck with Arkansas license plates sitting in front of my residence at St. Joseph’s in Apple Creek. I did not really think much of it, as people stop to visit the church or the grotto all summer, from all over.
About an hour later I was walking out of the house and this stranger, who had been walking around the old cemetery yelled at me and came trotting over. He told me that he was originally from Tennessee and was now teaching history at a college in Arkansas. He informed me that he spends a couple of weeks every summer traveling around the region looking for old cemeteries, and he was fascinated by our cemetery. He asked if we had a register, a map or any kind of plotting of the cemetery that he could look at, and unfortunately I had to tell him no. I discovered the difference between a cemetery and a graveyard----a graveyard is directly connected to a church, a cemetery is some distance away---and, for a student of history, something fascinating. It is rare to find cemeteries in this region of the country before 1860, especially outside of larger towns and cities, due to the fact that early settlers usually just buried their dead on a small designated plot of ground on the family farm. That changed with the Civil War. There were so many dead that even small towns and villages began putting aside a plot of common ground for burying the dead.
The summer visitor found headstones with dates from 1840s and 1850s and wanted to see a plotting of the graveyard. Sadly, we have no records that show any information. All of our records are with the new cemetery (from 1937), all of the old records are missing. After meeting him, I have decided that one of our projects over the next year or two will be to try and plot out our old graveyard and fill it in with as much information as we can come with.
