Maybe someone can help me become unpuzzled about something. Last fall I went for a drive in Maine, and when I was travelling down this dirt road I saw what looked like a cemetary right by the side of the road. I stopped & checked it out, and there were perhaps a dozen human-sized graves, 2 or 3 of which looked pretty new. The cemetary itself didn’t look much older than a few years. There weren’t proper headstones, but some crude wooden crosses were stuck into the dirt at the head of the graves. I’d have thought it was for pets, if the graves weren’t so large. This road had some farms on it, and people were riding horseback down the road - if they’d been bigger, horse graves would be a guess as well, but I doubt horses could fit in those graves.
Could these have been human graves? What are the laws for burial in Maine?
Some of my ancestors are buried in a small family plot immediately to the side of what’s now a farm road in central Texas. You couldn’t put a cemetery there nowadays, but it can’t be disturbed now. Are you certain it was a new cemetery? Could it have been a recently tended but older one?
It was right by the side of the road, easily visible to everyone driving by (or horseback riding by, probably more horses than cars). It didn’t look illicit to me, just strange.
Hammerbach, I do a LOT of driving. It’s hard for me to remember exactly where it was, perhaps around the Biddeford area. It was very near the coast. I think I remember some sort of maritime museum not too far away. I also remember a field right off of a main route near there in which I saw people flying radio controlled planes. IIRC maybe 10 miles down that same road there was a parking and picnic area with a pond and reeds. I know I’ve probably narrowed it down to somewhere between Canada & NH with those details…
I’ll search in Yahoo maps a bit more later when I’ve got more time, maybe I can narrow it down.
Here in Bath we have a place where people do the RC thing, the Maine Maritime Museum, and a couple of the ubiquitous picnic areas with ponds and reeds within 10 miles. If you ever remember more details, I’ll try to chase it down for you.
If it was near Ludlow, maybe it was Pet Sematary. Okay, probably not.
There are still many states that permit burial on private property in rural areas, but in densely settled areas it is usually prohibited either by state law or by local ordinance.
In Maine as of 1987, the law stated that existing family burial grounds of less than a quarter acre that are fenced in and registered with the town or county are “grandfathered”, so they remain burial places forever and new burials there are permitted. Burial on private property other than in such a graveyard may still be permitted in some towns, but you have to check with the town to see what their rules are.
Okay, I’m not 100% sure that new burials in existing family graveyards are always permitted (with permission of the landowner I mean). That seems to be the implication, but it isn’t stated outright. I am sure that private burials in some rural parts of the state are allowed.