Mt. Hope Church & Cemetery Volunteer Workday

October is Cemetery Month.  On Saturday October 28 a special "Mt. Hope Church and Cemetery Volunteer Workday" was held at Mt. Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Nanjemoy.   The event was sponsored by the Mt. Hope Church community, Preservation Maryland, Coalition to Protect Maryland Burial Sites, Charles County Planning, and the Association for Preservation Technology.

There were four areas of activity during the day:

• Mt. Hope Cemetery Conservation and Headstone Documentation 
• Recording History - both oral and family documents
• Architectural Documentation  of Carroll Family Farmhouse
• Archaeology at Carroll Family Cemetery

Five CCASM members volunteered - Denise, Joe, Evelyn, Julie, Carol, and Jim.  And guess which activity we choose.  Archaeology at the Carroll Family Cemetery, of course.  It was not just us at the cemetery.  There were many, many members of Mt Hope Church and of the Carroll family that also helped at this site.

Esther Read, the Charles County archaeologist, was in charge.  If you have never looked for graves in an unmarked cemetery, here is what we did.  First, we looked for impressions in the ground.  Over time after someone is buried and starts to return to the soil, the ground on top begins to sink in.  We also looked for posts in the ground and rocks that may have marked graves.  And we found quite a few.  Scott Lawrence's experience working with old cemeteries definitely helped.  After the possible graves were marked with flags, we documented each one - length, width, amount of depression, presence of a marker, and presence of other plants, such as periwinkle, that were historically planted in cemeteries.  Also Jim Gibb brought a Total Station, an electronic transit, and recorded the positions of the head and the foot of all the possible graves as well of any posts or stones.

All the data gathered will be turned over to Mt. Hope Church.  Hopefully, in the future we will be able to learn more about what was found.