Mac Cemetery
Mac Cemetery is an enigma.
We were told of a graveyard that seems to have vanished. Not a trace. The old-timers tell of many a cemetery in these mountains where nothing remains. But in the case of Mac, one day all the headstones were discovered to have disappeared. The remnants of an illegal backcountry campsite were found nearby, and the fire ring appeared to have been built with fieldstones that could have been old unengraved headstones. We heard conflicting accounts as to when this desecration occurred, one variation attributing it to CCC camp enrollees back in the 1930s, another placing it into more recent times.
What kind of pack mentality commits such an act without understanding what their actions mean? To quote Ebenezer Scrooge, "Are there no prisons?" - not so much to punish the former campers for something that cannot be atoned or undone, but because one function of a prison is to insulate society from creatures who would do us harm.
There are two very real problems with the fire pit issue, neither having anything to do with desecration, dishonor, disrespect or any of the things that happen only inside our heads. The problems are much more concrete. First, the primary function of a headstone is to indicate the precise spot where a body was buried. Pull the stones up and soon you no longer know where the body is. Second, people expect a cemetery to look like a cemetery. Throw the gravestones in a pile and as leaf litter accumulates, it doesn't take long before your pile looks like any other pile of fieldstones in any other Smoky Mountain forest, and the site soon becomes unidentifiable as a burial ground.
Mac Cemetery is said to be situated on a hillside above the footbridge that takes Kephart Prong Trail across the Oconaluftee River. Several topographical maps indicate a "Mac Cemetery" farther to the south (where, incidentally, no headstones are to be found), but every resource we contacted said the site is indeed above the footbridge - which brings up a whole new set of questions as to why the cartographers would have gotten it wrong.
We sought out a Park ranger considered by many to be an authority on the old cemeteries. He said the illegal campsite with its fire ring made of vandalized tombstones was discovered in the 1970s, so we can't blame it on the CCC men. This fire ring had been built not far from the actual location of the graves. Since that discovery, the stones have been restored to their rightful positions, as closely as was possible.
The table of cemetery GPS coordinates, provided by the National Park library at Sugarlands Visitor Center, indicates a "Kephart Prong" cemetery corresponding to the general location the ranger had given us. Where did these GPS bearings come from? They didn't just pull them out of the blue. Did someone knowledgeable lead the researchers to the site?
The Swain County cemetery directory indicates that four unmarked graves are located at Mac, noting the census was taken in January 1999. This directory uses the term "unmarked" to specify the absence of a name, even on graves marked with an uninscribed stone. The book does not elaborate further on the Mac graves, but also places them above Kephart Prong Trail.
And so we went there, using the GPS coordinates as our guide. Having been told by the ranger that the stones had been restored to their original positions, we expected to find four headstones forming a ragtag little cemetery. We found no more than an ordinary place in the woods that without the GPS would never have jumped out at us as a burial site.
Being backpackers ourselves, this particular site did not strike us as any place you would think to set up camp. You pitch camp within reasonable proximity to a water source, taking care to stay above flood range. The cemetery site is way up on the ridge and nobody would want to haul water uphill that far. Granted, the story says the headstones were moved to the campsite - but no rational camper would manhandle stones of that size and weight down to the water when the creekside is littered with suitable stones for the taking.
If in fact we stood on the hollowed ground of Mac Cemetery, it has yet again succumbed to the ravages of time, nature, man and neglect. Especially since no one knows even the names of those buried there. Buried maybe there. We don't know anyone's name, age, gender, or their relation to each other. We know nothing about their lives. We don't even know if they are buried where we think they are buried, because the stones were repositioned based on memory, or maybe dowsing.
So maybe we were at Mac Cemetery. The GPS data said so. Maybe we were just standing by some random rocks out in the woods above the Oconaluftee.