I Found Another Old Cemetery with the Weirdest Headstone Yet

I have been carefully honing what Matt calls my "old lady hobby" of poking around old cemeteries by, well, poking around old cemeteries!

But. I mean. They're interesting!

You get to drive around old country roads and take in the scenery while you look for them, and sometimes there are herds of deer or massive brambles of wild black raspberries. Then when you find one, you get to wander around and read all the stones and be all, "Huh, Thelma. You don't see a name like Thelma anymore!" Or "Awww, sixteen children and they all died from something penicillin could have cured in one dose. The 1800s were so sad!"

Okay, it IS an old lady hobby. Whatever, it's fun.

It's especially fun in autumn. Look at how lovely Mount Salem Cemetery is, tucked into the woods up on a little hill by the highway. You'd never know it was there if you didn't know it was there:

As far as I can tell, this cemetery was lost sometime after 1937, then rediscovered in the early 2010s, after which it was fenced and maintained and some headstones repaired--

Consort, eh? I can't tell if they're being rude or not.

--but I can't find any evidence from the past few years that the cemetery is still on the must-visit list of more than a handful of people.

I found a list of tombstone inscriptions from Mount Salem Cemetery that was sent into the Indiana Magazine of History's June 1937 edition, and I think it would be interesting to go back to the cemetery to compare the list to what's still visible. 

You can also use that list of inscriptions to identify tombstones. Here, for example, must be Richard Perry!

This tombstone is the strangest one I've seen yet:

Look closer at it. William Ross lived to be 116 years old!

Surely not, right?

But people living in his own lifetime believed it of him. Here's an article written about him when he was 115 years old.

William Ross' stone is proof that the cemetery is still being maintained in some fashion, because when this photograph was taken in 2020, his headstone was still broken.

I hate seeing headstones leaned up against trees. You'll likely never figure out exactly where they go back to, so now all that precious local history is context-less. 

I also thought it was strange that there wasn't any yucca growing anywhere. Yucca is THE plant that you'll find in local cemeteries here. It's not native, though--I've heard stories that it might have been brought up from Florida?--so is it possible that this cemetery predates the yucca fad?

I must make a mental note to go back in the spring and look for daffodils.

P.S. Here are my other favorite old cemeteries so far:

• Mt. Ebal Cemetery
• Friendship Cemetery
• Rose Hill Cemetery
• Allens Creek Cemetery