Old East Coast Cemetery

I was walking today in the Herndon Virginia area in search of a sweet tea which required nearly an hour and several plodding miles to accomplish. Along the way I spotted a secluded little cemetery and decided to have a look. 

From the sign at the entrance, I knew that it was on the grounds of the Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church that had moved a couple times while maintaining the cemetery.  Just inside the grounds was a special section where the former pastors of the church were buried.  One gravestone caught my eye. 

It seems that Reverend William L. Hill, who lived to the ripe old age of 89, pastored the church for 49 years.  In this day and age, that seems incomprehensible.  Who would put up with a pastor, or what pastor would put up with a congregation, for 49 years?  Most of the other gravestones in the area were illegible or not even

gravestones.  It was then I realized that I was unceremoniously traipsing over the graves of long dead paupers and possibly soldiers. 

The graveyard was obviously maintained and had a few new grave sites.  I could tell by the large granite slabs with names of the deceased and their birth and death dates, some of which were in 2015. But by far, the majority of the graves I had inadvertently walked on were only marked with a stone pulled from a nearby hillside. It got me thinking of the history of the place.  I am in an area that saw many Civil War battles, but an Internet search told me the original church was built in 1867 so the cemetery might not be a place where Civil War dead were interred.

But maybe it was.  One legible tombstone marked a death date in 1839, so maybe the cemetery came first followed by the church.  If true, I was standing on hallowed ground where Civil War soldiers were buried at sites hastily marked with rocks.  It was then I noticed that what I had thought were open walkways between rows of graves were also graves with much of the rock markers buried.  I suddenly felt irreverent walking on those graves and promptly left after taking a few pictures.

An obvious attempt was made at the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery to identify the dead, and a few modern markers and American flags were sparsely distributed next to a few of the rock markers, but there must have been hundreds of simply marked anonymous graves in this one cemetery.  I suppose there are hundreds of similar sites near Civil War battle fields across the country.  Each with scores or hundreds, or even thousands of rock markers.  A glimpse of, and a sobering thought of what it must have been like to live in America during the 1860's.