This marker remains standing in a Montreal cemetery…
TRUE STORY, SEEN WITH MY OWN EYES. | In the Notre-Dame-Des-N… | Flickr
Old St. Joseph’s Cemetery (circa 1759) is about a mile from my house. It was last used around 1991 - there’s a newer one just up the hill and directly across the street from the church.
There’s nothing personal about it other than I pass it frequently on my way south. I’ve only lived around here since 2004 - my mom and sibs still live around Baltimore. Sadly, it’s been vandalized and several times, cars have gone off the road and taken out the fence.
Quaker burial grounds that were subsequently forgotten are a thing here (England). The Quakers would not be buried in Church of England churchyards, and preferred to raise no memorials or gravestones and sometimes people find, during extensions etc. that their houses have been built on top of a Quaker burying ground.
What I find fascinating are tiny cemetereies – I call them “vvest pocket” cemeteries, after the tiont “vest pocket” parks in NYC – that there seem to be several of in Massachusetts.
The Curtis-Very Cemetery looks as if it was crammed in as an afterthought between two houses near a branch fire department in Peabody, Massachusetts. It looks as if it has about three graves and a mausoleum intruding on somebody’s side yard
There are quite a few such tiny family cemeteries in Peabody, but most aren’t as prominent or as well-marked ass this one.
https://www.peabody-ma.gov/historical_comm/HistoricalCemeterylistPHC).pdf
There’s also the single grave of George washington Flint on Route 1 in Peabody not far from me:
And the Moulton Family plot literally on Route 1 in West Peabody , hemmed in by a gas station (which takes care of cutting the grass and such)
Much further down Route 1 in New Brunswick, NJ there’s the single gravestone of Mary Ellis, surrounded by the parking lot of the AMC movie theater complex
It wasn’t so much that Quaker graves were unmarked as that Quakers were unsentimental and very practical about them. There were cases where, because they already owned the land, they built over existing graveyards when building new meeting houses. Some sites were also acquired by new non-Quaker owners in the full knowledge of that was there. An example would be the site of the Brighton Dome, most famous as the venue for the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest.
The ones that haven’t been built over, the really old ones look like rolling waves of grass. There is one in Nantucket.
Found it! It’s White Lake Pioneer Cemetery, just off Ontario Highway 62, north of Ivanhoe:
The album at the link has many great photos of gravestones among the trees, but it does have the tripod with the granite heart that I mentioned earlier:
