Been walking around the old Wheeler Watson Cementary up at Huyck Preserve 🪦

It’s in terrible state of disrepair, abandoned, forgotten long ago as most of the grave stones date back to the 1840s – which was a 180 years ago. Many of the markers are broken, most being simple locally harvested blue stone although some are marble. 

It has to have been a much simpler life back then. Far less government influence and regulations. There were probably far fewer police officers and no speed traps, people probably did pretty much whatever they wanted in the backwoods. If people had any idea of what happened in Washington DC, by the time they got the news it was weeks old.

People, especially the many farm families up this way had to be quite self reliant. There simply weren’t all the synthetic materials of today, not to say that they weren’t already using many toxic substances carelessly – they were. Forests by then certainly were being overcut, land abused by farming and tillage, forests over hunted and left denuded.

Historical sites often glamorize the colonial times, paintings give them a romantic image. Colonial people where hardly conservationists, and they were pretty violent both to nature and their fellow human beings. But there also was a simplicity and a local culture lost in the era of motoring and cheap, quickly discarded plastic from China.