Academic paper unearths Hartley cemetery saga
By Scott Nicholson
nicholson@wataugademocrat.com

Rob Brown, a geography professor at Appalachian State University, took a story of a relocated Watauga County cemetery and introduced it to the world of academia.

Brown, a self-described “cultural geographer,” said the relocation of the Hartley cemetery to make room for a new Watauga High School was fascinating because of its reflection on how people think of land and people.

He compiled research and collected it in a paper entitled “A Grave on the Green Hillside: Sacred Space and Political Struggle in the Southern Appalachians.”

“Obviously I had read about it and was fascinated with Appalachian culture and the whole idea of the changing use of space,” Brown said. “I asked some of the (Hartley) family if they minded if I hung around, and I just went out a few days while they were doing their excavation.”

The graves had been neglected for decades and reportedly the headstones were removed and Christmas trees planted over the property, and members of the family that held the cemetery deed had sold it for $10,000.

The property near Perkinsville had been proposed as a planned residential development several years ago but the Boone Board of Adjustment was never satisfied with claims that there were no bodies on the site.

When the county commissioners began exploring the property as a possible high school site, geologists found evidence of graves. Later analysis revealed 39 graves that were eventually moved to nearby Mount Lawn Memorial Park and Gardens. Brown was fascinated by the conflict of families, politics and resolutions and how the same piece of land was viewed and treated by different people.

“Cultural geographers are interested in human cultural patterns on the land and one of the areas I’m interested in is cultural landscapes,” Brown said. “I just got interested in this idea of different people having different ideas about the same space. For one group it was a civic space and for another group it was a sacred space, and I was interested in how they worked out the differences.”

Brown researched the theoretical “sacred space” idea and how people choose locations that take on meaning over time. “People create sacred spaces through rituals, and they surround burial practices today,” he said.

“There’s the uniqueness of Appalachian culture and traditional burial practices, problems before embalming, and the idea that people buried their own and didn’t relegate that to professionals. Family prepared and addressed the body and the men prepared the graves. Lots of craftsmanship and attention went into digging graves.”

Brown found the burial rituals at the Hartley cemetery probably fit more into patterns of Southern burial practices of the early 1800s. He said that era was really when the American South was being settled, so those practices grew when Southern culture grew, expanding into Appalachia.

“It was totally family oriented,” he said. “It wasn’t until the turn of the century that people began turning over burials to professionals. It was necessary because they didn’t have access to transportation. It was functional for the family and a culture arose out of that. If a loved one died, you took care of that. You understood what death meant.”

Brown said people now more distanced from the funeral preparations, which at one time were true community events. “There might be 10 guys out there digging the graves and taking turns,” he said, noting practicality often trumped formality because of decomposition. “Appalachian burial might have been done without any ceremony—it would have had to be done in a day or two—and with delayed services, in some cases maybe even for a year, to get a minister and family together.”

Brown said families almost always made their own coffins, sometimes even building their own in anticipation of death. “Some people would already have their coffin ready,” he said. “Sometimes you still find them sitting in old barns.”

“Another part of it that has captured my attention is the fieldstones that were used for markers,” Brown said, noting that he’s been looking for other cemeteries that have only those fieldstones. “To me, those are even more powerful than grave stones with etchings and names. I feel a responsibility to respect it.”

Brown said humanistic geography, the human experience of spaces and places, is what drew him to the story. “The whole politics, and this family and their connection to it, and just the idea that people invest meaning in places, that’s what interested me. What happens when it gets in the way of progress is a difficult issue.”

He also reflected on the human need to understand the mysteries of life and death and how such thoughts and beliefs are attached to specific locations.

“How I feel when I go into a graveyard, it doesn’t matter whether it’s my family or not,” Brown said. “It’s still a sacred space, just like a church or a cathedral in France. Those are sacred spaces.”

Brown is a member of the Association of American Geographers and presented his paper in November at the association’s Southeastern conference in Charleston, S.C. He eventually plans to publish the article in a professional journal.

“It’s an exploration of sacred spaces of folk populations,” Brown said. “I think usually research for sacred spaces has to do with churches or memorials, and I think it’s less common to have these sacred spaces taken down to this level.”

On a personal level, Brown appreciated the insight he gained from exploring the way people regarded their ancestors, both then and now. “It’s given me a more concrete understanding of the cultural history of the area,” Brown said. “To be able to look at that vault carved into the rock…we just don’t have many structures dating back to the 1800s. It’s made Appalachian culture more tangible to me.”