Old Headstones From 19th Century Cemetery Used To Prevent Erosion (govt worker condones)

CBS Philly ^ | December 22 | Steve Tawa

[caver]

We camped in a certain area at JPG over a weekend. We took along a metal detector and checked the area where we had set up the tents and a camp fire. The metal detector was going crazy the whole time we were sweeping it. We dug up so much shrapnel that we finally just said forget it.

[PghBaldy]

No, it is not in Philly. It is Pittsburgh.

[kearnyirish2]

Doodletown NY (just below West Point along the Hudson River) was taken by the state via emminent domain in the mid-1960s. Bear Mountain State Park had been buying property lots there for decades, but couldn’t convince everyone to sell so they took the remaining properties. The original cemetery (there are still 2 others there) had disappeared by 1965 (it was from the late 18th century), and workers remembered using the stones to line ditches in the 1930s (it was like a CCC project).

Disgraceful; there are still small cemeteries throughout the parks there, some protected by a preacher that used to travel between the small settlements that had existed there.

[Bigg Red]

Okay, thanks. Just curious. My father, b. 1911, was baptized at St. Boniface in Philadelphia.

[muawiyah]

There was this event called the Underground Railroad. Parts of it became fairly well known ~ particularly in the Eastern states. In the Midwest there was a branch that ran up through Kentucky and you would go from there across the Ohio, and then to safe houses all through Indiana and Ohio.

There's more to it than that ~ the Indians had earlier ~ centuries earlier ~ laid out an outline of the Big Dipper ~ a small one toward Richmond Indiana, and a large one that extended from the council circle at Seymour up into Michigan North of the St. Joseph river.

That was the trail ~ no way to get lost with a map in the sky.

Along the way I've found that Quaker farmers owned all the land all along that trail. It actually runs through the Mammoth Cave park area. The Hughes family, who'd earlier settled mostly in SE Indiana and SW Ohio, expanded in the 1840s into Kentucky.

Best I can tell you could travel from Tennessee to Michigan and never leave a Hughes farm. Not all of them went by that name ~ there are, after all 11 other classic Welsh names ~ and there were marriages with Abolitionist Scots ~ so lots of Macs, Mcs, O's and whatevers in the crowd, but all cousins with roots back to Cardiganshire, Wales.

My longest lived Great Grandmother grew up on one of those farms near Mammoth ~ and later on inherited a chunk of the orchard lands where they buried slavecatchers ~ probably didn't even tell her about it though my Great Aunts seemed to know.

After the Civil War part of the properties were given over to a Freed Man's school to teach former slaves how to read, write, use math, lay bricks, cut stone, plough a field ~ that's been closed for a very long time but recently someone made note of its existence. May go there to see what's left.

[caver]

Interesting family history on your side!

[PghBaldy]

I don’t know what the answer is, but to lie in the muck of a river? Sorry for late reply. Happy New Year.