Travels of Jackie and Randy: Cemetery Thoughts

Before we went to Savannah, we bicycled to a little cemetery here on Hilton Head Island (4.4 miles, each way!). The Zion Chapel of Ease and Cemetery is a small cemetery with just one thing in common with Savannah's big Colonial Park cemetery - there is no telling where most of the bodies are buried. This little cemetery has been desecrated by weather and people for years. A big store swept over the island in 1893, and the remaining cemetery was neglected for a long time. Now a fence surrounds the known cemetery but there are not many headstones left, and there are some kind of stones scattered outside the fence. . .

The Baynard Mausoleum, built in 1846, is still standing but it's getting shaky. Because of that shakiness, the deceased Baynard family members aren't here anymore. But the mausoleum is billed as the "oldest intact structure on Hilton Head Island" and there is a project underway to sustain it.

The first chapel here was started in 1767, and the earliest documented graves are from 1795. This is the resting place of some Revolutionary war veterans. On one grave someone did a nice job of adding a new marker while leaving the original one - it seems very respectful. Interesting to think how Isaac Baldwin would have lived, so long ago.

This place has been here so long that one of the trees has grown around a headstone.

I don't know why I like old cemeteries, but I do. I get the same feeling from ancient hand prints on cave walls - like a specific person is reaching out across time. These markers are for people who lived full lives, were missed when they died, and documented by stones so their lives would not be completely forgotten. It doesn't really matter that we will never know them, it only matters that these stones mark their existence, and the existence of their slice of time.