Interesting Headstones
The dignified grave monument we know today is a product of more recent times. After the turn of the century, around 1900, commercially-produced markers became more common in Smoky Mountain cemeteries.
But before the advent of manufactured headstones, graves were marked by simple fieldstones harvested off the land. People who made their livelihoods through subsistence farming could seldom afford a fancy store-bought headstone. So they found interesting natural stones, and mountain cemeteries reflect the imagination that went into the selection of grave markers. (The Smoky Mountains certainly provided no lack of rocks - much to the vexation of the plowman.)
Many of these old stones had no inscriptions. For one thing, the population in those days was generally illiterate, so an inscription was somewhat irrelevant. Moreover, in the days of the Smoky Mountain settlers, a rich oral tradition passed along a community's history from one generation to the next. Any member of a community could walk through a cemetery and tell you who was buried where.
Sadly, those communities are gone. And gone with them are the oral histories they supported. Many stones that once bore inscriptions are gradually succumbing to erosion, as the faint lettering weathers away. We salute the work of dedicated historians who are today scrambling to identify and record the histories of those buried under these unmarked stones, lest their legacy be forever lost to time.
The photos that follow here are but a small sampling of old fieldstone grave markers that caught our attention for one reason or another.
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