WILLIAMSBURG W.Va. (WVDN) – On a hot Aug. 19, several volunteers from the Williamsburg and Trout area joined forces to clean a private cemetery between their communities, which had become overgrown.
A sign was also placed in the Maggie Cemetery which has many headstones that are not engraved, just a native rock to mark the site of a long-lost family member. The cemetery is large and permission and a key to access the property are needed to enter it.
Several area families have ancestors in Maggie Cemetery including Gladwell, Sizemore, Payne, Wood, Blankenship and Nicely among others.
This small group of neighbors made a lot of family members happy, showing respect and doing the hard work of clearing brush and weeds. Debbie Judy said, “You had to have seen it before to understand what a difference (improvement) this makes.”
Metal markers had been placed with the help of the Williamsburg District Historical Foundation in the mid-1990s and identified about 15 graves that lacked marked headstones. Over the years, even some of those markers did not withstand the assaults of mother nature and were lost from tree falls and overgrowth just burying the markers.
A full list of the marked graves is in a book called Williamsburg Cemetery Book and sold at the Greenbrier Historical Society in North House Museum, Lewisburg.
