As fulltime lovers of small, rural, abandoned cemeteries, this story caught our eye.
The Shropshire gravesite is in the Appalachian foothills outside Gore, Georgia. About 1,000 feet from the clearing is an old, abandoned church on a dusty dirt road. Experts say that if slaves or former slaves are buried at the site, it would be a unique archeological find.
“In Appalachia, it would be extremely rare to have a black or slave graveyard,” explained Ruth Little, co-author of “Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers.” “The farms in Appalachia were small, and there were fewer slaves.”
Little says slave cemeteries in the area would have been marked with field stones, like the rocks at the site, or wooden stakes that burned down.