I know – I’m too late for Halloween.
But whatever the time of year – I do love graveyards. Old graveyards.
Whether it’s a Neolithic burial mound, a stone cross on the moors or a marble mausoleum, each has stories to tell.
It should therefore not be any great surprise that a certain amount of my Appalachian Mountains holiday was spent in graveyards.
The address of the log cabin where we stayed was Scruggs Cemetery Lane. It was interesting that the cabins website doesn’t actually mention that. Perhaps they were afraid of putting people off.
Not me.
The evening we arrived, we were exploring the woods around our cabin. We were, I admit, carrying bottles of beer and that’s how we walked into the cemetery.
My first thought was that we were in the opening scene of a Stephen King novel – and before the vengeful ghosts could take offence, we put aside our beers.
The cemetery itself was fascinating. It appeared all the graves were members of the same family – the Scruggs family who were among the early settlers here.
We found one that had a different name. It was set off to the side, so perhaps it was someone who married into the family. The earliest date we could see on the fallen and weathered stones was 1893.
A local resident told us there are still family members living in the area. They visit the cemetery a couple of times a year to care for it. That was obvious in the recently erected stones that marked much older graves.
I have to say, there would be worse places to lie at rest that in that quiet woodland.
We came upon another graveyard in a church at Cades Cove – the historic settlement in the Great Smoky National Park.
The church was one of three in a community that, at its peak, had about 125 families living there.
The gravestones told some poignant stories.
Life was tough for these early mountain settlers, but it seemed that if a child survived to adulthood – they could look forward to a long life. A remarkable number lived close to a hundred years – sometimes more. And without the sort of medical care we have today.
I wonder if their lifestyle – hard work, simple food, good moonshine – had anything to do with it.
Many of the people who lived in the Cove were poor – too poor to pay for a fancy gravestone. And their lack of schooling showed in the markers they carved when tragedy struck.
I found the graveyard quite moving.
Many of the stones are now too old and weathered to read… names are forgotten – but the stories never will be.