Flooding can cause caskets to float away and headstones to disappear as climate change hits cemeteries

A coffin juts out of a riverbank.
(Courtsey photo by Judy Blair Berry)

Climate change can mean prolonged or repeated flooding in some areas unprepared for submersion; graveyards and cemeteries are experiencing unearthed remains and floating caskets, reports Dinah Voyles Pulver of USA Today. "Thousands of graves have been disturbed in cemeteries nationwide in the past 30 years. Flooding, erosion and other climate-related weather disasters have been reported in at least 21 states and 15 countries over the past three decades. Coffins have washed away, and bones have been exposed in big cities and tiny hamlets."

Cemeteries have long struggled with neglect and upkeep expenses, but extreme weather has amplified the problem. Judy Blair Berry and her husband told Pulver of a prime example. The couple was "motoring along the Pearl River in Copiah County, Mississippi, when she looked up from the boat to see a casket jutting out of the bank above the river. Pieces of gravestones lay scattered on the shore. . . . Mississippi, and its neighbors to the north are among the states in the eastern half of the United States experiencing more rainfall extremes since the 1990s, including increases in the number of days with more than an inch of rain."

Families have had to rebury loved ones, and state and local governments, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and cemetery associations "are already spending millions to preserve cemeteries and build seawalls, and relocate or rebury remains," Pulver reports. "Perhaps nowhere have the effects of climate change had more impact on cemeteries than in Louisiana. At least 11 hurricanes have pummeled the Bayou State since 2002, disturbing thousands of graves and washing away hundreds of vaults and caskets. . . . At least a dozen cemeteries in southern Louisiana parishes have succumbed to rising seas and sinking land, The Associated Press has reported."

Pulver explains, "Water can infiltrate a burial site in several ways, and each type of casket, whether it's sealed, unsealed or inside a vault, can develop issues. . . . Options are available to help protect cemeteries and have been used at some locations in the U.S., including adding seawalls and stabilizing shorelines. A more complex and expensive step also has been needed in some cemeteries: moving the graves to safer locations."

Six Central Arkansas communities share their African American history in an effort to help recover and preserve it

Damita Markes of Little Rock examines one of the displays.
(Photo by Staci Vandagriff, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

Arkansas 365 is a state highway that was once part of U.S. 65. It cuts through the heart of the state, from Conway to Little Rock to Pine Bluff, traversing many historic areas, including Black communities whose history has often been obscured or forgotten. To correct that, the Preservation of African American Cemeteries, an Arkansas nonprofit, launched "Project 365" with a grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council. Over the weekend, leaders from six of the communities gathered for "The Big Reveal," reports Ashley Savage of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

"Those leading Project 365 hope to use cemetery transcriptions, slave narratives, oral history, church histories and photographs to better preserve African American history in the communities of Hensley, Woodson, Wrightsville, Higgins, Sweet Home and College Station," Savage reports, quoting Tamala Tenpenny-Lewis, president and co-founder of the cemeteries group: "There's not a lot of written history in these rural areas. Actually, there's really none at all. A collective history of the community is just not there."

Arkansas 365 (Wikipedia map)

Tenpenny-Lewis told Savage that the project is still seeking documentary materials, and the research relates directly to the reason her orgaization was founded: "We thought it was important to form this organization because there are so many cemeteries -- particularly in the rural South -- that are abandoned and in threat of destruction. So much of history is being lost."

The two-day presentation in the Wrightsville City Hall Gymnasium was titled "How cemeteries reveal the history of early Black communities." The event ended with luncheon for seniors who are helping with research and interviews. Ruth Hill, 93, "said she thinks efforts like Project 365 are crucial because it encourages younger people to get involved in learning and preserving the history that exists in their communities," Savage reports, quoting her: "In your past, there is somebody who has been outstanding. People are fascinated by it."

Federal and state officials erased a Black cemetery; their only public notice was a legal ad too many people missed

Mike and David Moseley at an ancestor's grave
(Photo by Christopher Smith for ProPublica)

Construction site excavators often unearth surprises, but what comes after the find can be more disturbing.

"Nobody working to bring a $346 million Microsoft project to rural Virginia expected to find graves in the woods . . . but surveyors happened upon a cemetery. The largest of the stones bore the name Stephen Moseley in a layer of cracking plaster. Another stone, in near perfect condition, belonged to Stephen’s toddler son," reports Christopher Smith for ProPublica.

"This is not as bad as it sounds," an engineering consultant wrote in March 2014 to Microsoft and an official in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, who was helping clear hurdles for the project — an expansion of a massive data center. "We should be able to relocate these graves." But archaeologists, which federal law required, said the cemetery was eligible for the National Register of Historic Places because it was for "a community of landowners who farmed tobacco in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction," Smith writes. Their report "stressed the cemetery’s significance to African American life and death, citing the fact that Stephen Moseley and his relatives were Black,' and advising: "It is recommended that the area be avoided."

The county and consultants challenged the recommendation. "They sent the report to another archaeologist, seeking a second opinion," Smith writes. "But the archaeologist didn’t go along. . . he rejected the notion that some of the people buried there might be white. 'Jim Crow would not have had whites and blacks buried that closely together,' he wrote. . . . He suggested that the original firm conduct additional historical research. 'More work needs to be done on Moseley family members to identify who’s in the graves,' he wrote in an email to Jones’ boss, who forwarded it to the county. . . . The county and its consultants ignored the advice."

The county and consultants continued to pursue the property for Microsoft. They "ran a legal notice tucked among the ads and classifieds in several weekly print editions of The Mecklenburg Sun," Smith reports. "The second week the notice ran, the paper published a front-page story [about another subject] under the byline Mike Moseley. Moseley is a staff writer. He is also Stephen Moseley’s great-grandson. . . . Mike Moseley would not have been hard to locate, had the county actually tried to find Stephen Moseley’s descendants." Mike Moseley told Smith, “Everyone who works for the county knows me. They know who we are. It’s hard to understand how they didn’t come talk to us.”

When Smith asked Moseley "if he’d seen the notice in the pages of his own newspaper, he responded: 'Do you read the classifieds and the ads? I do not.' . . . Like his nephew, David Moseley heard nothing from the county about the threat to the cemetery. The soft-spoken retired schoolteacher and administrator, who is now 85, grew up on the land adjacent to where Microsoft was building its data center." He told Smith, “Somebody would have called me if they moved the cemetery."

Smith reports, "In the months after the notice that ran in The Mecklenburg Sun, workers kept finding graves, ultimately 37 of them. . . . A crew dug up each of the graves, collecting bones, casket fragments, metal handles and hinges, etched epitaph plaques, a pair of eyeglasses, an ivory comb. The remains and other items were packed in plastic crates and stored in an office. Months later, all of it was reburied in four tightly packed, $500 cemetery plots one town to the north." The county did not reply to Smith's questions about the handling of the issue, Other than County Administrator Wayne Carter saying the newspaper notice was sufficient to comply with the law.

Smith writes: "In Mecklenburg County, before Microsoft took possession of the land — for free, with significant tax breaks, along with state development dollars earmarked for struggling tobacco farming regions — the Army Corps [of Engineers] raised no concerns about the development’s compliance with the [National Historic] Preservation Act. Nor did the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the agency tasked with enforcing state and federal preservation laws, make any effort to step in and protect the site. . . . The Army Corps and the Department of Historic Resources facilitated the cemetery’s legal erasure."

David Moseley and other family members, "still own the eastern 83 acres of the property," Smith writes. "Every so often, David Moseley or another family member gets an offer to buy their remaining land. Sometimes the correspondence is signed by Wayne Carter, the county administrator who oversaw the permitting process for the Microsoft data center. David asked Smith, "If they can find us to buy the land, why couldn’t they find us for the cemetery?”

Fred McGhee, an African American archaeologist, told Smith: “We are among the only developed countries in the world that considers archaeological sites on private property to be private property themselves rather than cultural heritage. Black historic places are some of the first to get maligned.”

Family cemeteries offer a window into the past, but many if not most are not well tended; who will care for them?

The Swinford Cemetery in Harrison County, Kentucky, is maintained well. (Photo by Michael Swensen)

Jane Thomas honors her grandfather by tending the
family cemetery and beekeeping. (Photo by Jesse Barber)

Many if not most old family cemeteries have been long neglected, but they offer history and family connections that could be honored, Sarah Hume of Denison University writes for the Louisville Courier Journal. She received the Mary Withers Rural Writing Fellowship from Boyd's Station, a nonprofit arts and journalism residency program in Harrison County, Kentucky.

There are hundreds of family cemeteries "in Harrison County and across Kentucky," Hume writes. "Some are hidden behind barns, some prominently placed in front of homes. Others are tucked into quiet forests that were once active farms or churchyards." But for financial and ecological reasons, more Americans are choosing cremation, so family grave plots and cemeteries may become relics of the past, especially in rural areas that are losing population.

The National Funeral Directors Association estimates that by 2040, nearly 80% of Americans will choose cremation. "One of these days, these are going to be gone,” Denny Lipscombe, a local historian who researches cemeteries in Harrison County, told Hume. “And there needs to be some kind of documentation that these are here.” Lipscombe's life work became documenting family cemeteries with the details of who lived there and what they did, Hume writes.

Hume tells the story of Jane Thomas, who restored her family cemetery when she moved back to Harrison County "to care for her sick father . . . Thomas remembered her grandfather had once kept bees to make honey. She decided to start the practice again. . . . When she cares for the bees, she sometimes leans down to read the inscriptions on the grave markers."

Family cemeteries may become obsolete, but caring for them may offer solace and grace to some. “There’s a feeling of completion. Like full circle, maybe,” Thomas told Hume. “And I never stop thinking about the fact that I stand on their shoulders. What they went through, and what they endured, and what they did, made it possible for me to be.”

Many rural cemeteries are abandoned; who will tend them?

Photo collage by The Daily Yonder

"As families pull up roots to look for opportunities elsewhere, as young people move away from their hometowns, and as elders who had time for such tasks die out, rural communities are faced with a difficult question: Who will tend the graves? Additional factors like weather, climate change, economic challenges, and the mysteries of human behavior make the story even more complicated," Donna Kallner writes for The Daily Yonder, offering "the grave news from a few rural communities."

Her first example is from Nebraska, where "The Kearney Hub reported that the tax-exempt request for Dove Hill cemetery lists as its caretaker one Miriam Brandt. Brandt died in 2012. The county doesn’t know if someone else has assumed responsibility, although someone has left plastic flowers there. The unmarked, unfenced burial ground is overgrown by tall grasses. The lettering on its one standing gravestone is illegible, likely because of cattle rubbing against it."

State laws on cemeteries vary, but Kallner, who lives in Wisconsin, writes generally: "Unless neighbors come forward to tell the county board a cemetery is neglected or abandoned, local government’s options are limited. Many people don’t know that, or don’t want to seem disrespectful to the dead by complaining. They may take on the job informally and then move on — or die themselves, taking the secret of that good deed to the grave and leaving no one behind to carry on."