For many years i rode my dirtbikes on trails that ran alongside the catawba river in gaston county N.C. Theres a section of trail that always seemed to to be ancient, wheel ruts seemed permanent in spite on no vehicle traffic and the oaks grew in a canopy over the old road. It was confirmed when i stopped one day and walked out into the trees and brush off the edges and found several old brick foundations and rusty old sheetmetal, there had been houses or shops here once and the old trees proved to me that the site was 75+ years abandoned. This greatly interested me and i found several old maps online that showed considerable inhabitance right there beside the river, clustering around the site of a ferry. As i explored the site further i found another side trail, once a road too i think, that led torward town and upon following it i found a small cemetary identified only by 2 headstones and many foot deep large depressions in the ground indicating lots of sunken graves. I no longer remember the names of the Husband and wife buried and forgotton there in the woods but do remember that i easily found them both online in gaston county census records circa 1904 i believe. In any event, all this is still in the woods where i last saw it. I've often thought about that little cemetary and wondered when it would be discovered.
This afternoon i was driving down a road that also parallels the river, and stopped at a different roadside cemetary called Flatrock. Its apprx 1000 yards or so from the river, and the old forgotten cemetary in the woods happens to be maybe 600-800 yards torward the river from where i stood. I'd come to take a snapshot of several CSA graves that are present. One in particular is of considerable interest. Its a spot where seven CSA soldiers were honored by gravestone monuments. They were small town boys coming home after a long hard war. The story i was told a few years ago was that there was a ferry that had flipped and all 7 died in the rivers hard springtime flow upon their return home after wars end. April 25th 1865. Luckily, historians and groups like DAR and others have kept these seven in mind and recently have put these memorials up.
After plugging in a few of these soldiers names online i received lots more info on them, supposedly they had flipped in a fishing boat, not the ferry.. Then i also realized that they weren't actually buried there, just the markers erected in their names. Immediately i thought of the cemetary in the woods only hundreds of yards away near the river and wonder, are they buried there?
Heres an online version i found for one of the soldiers..
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=22368441
