Rising Bay Puts Cemeteries at Risk

In some cases, graves are destroyed from below. Rising, sometimes salty, groundwater destroys vaults and kills cemetery trees, which topple and expose graves. Arvel Johnson, who has rediscovered and cleaned up 10 African American cemeteries lost in the woods of the Eastern Shore, said he has seen that kind of damage.

"I looked at my great uncle a couple of times," said Johnson, a retired corrections officer. "There was a hole in the side of the vault, and he was floating on a casket piece."

But in most of the instances, the graveyards are threatened by the bay itself. As water rises, scientists say, waves and storms cause more shore erosion, exposing sites that were once solid ground.

"Sea level rise is the enabler, but storms are the action," said Bruce Douglas, a researcher at Florida International University.

Affected cemeteries can be found around the bay and along its tributaries. Near Kilmarnock, at the tip of Virginia's Northern Neck, about 140 miles from Washington, an "ossuary," or Indian burial pit, was uncovered in an eroding bluff. Then, in November, a pair of big storms passed, and it was gone.

In Jenkins Neck, Va., the York River has cut into a prized historical site that includes a 19th-century cemetery and Indian burials dating back more than 1,000 years. A grave believed to hold Joseph Smith, who died in the 1930s, is about two feet from the bank.

"Every high tide, it erodes, erodes," said John E. Owens, a neighbor who helps take care of the plot, a few miles north of Virginia's Hampton Roads area at the bay's southern end. "Within six more months of this year, it will be in the river."

The worst problems seem to be in Maryland's Dorchester County, a low-lying area where the Eastern Shore bulges out into the Chesapeake. A little more than halfway from Washington to Ocean City, a right turn at Cambridge, Md., takes visitors into an expanse of small towns and vast marshes.

In 1996, storms washed away a pair of small cemeteries in an area of Dorchester called Bishops Head. Now, when students visit the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's education center there, they go "progging" -- an old word that means searching the marsh -- and find dentures, bones and coffin parts.

"These are pallbearer's handles, all right," said Jessie Marsh, a foundation official, showing a collection of rusty handles, hinges and casket decorations found over the years. "Here" -- he picked up a handle with a bit of the rod still attached -- "you can see you've still got some of this wood."

In nearby Hoopersville, at Dorchester's remote southwestern edge, Willey is trying to save an abandoned community graveyard. He discovered the place by accident a few years ago, stubbing his toe on a headstone buried in underbrush.

Annie Wroten's grave and broken headstone are here, next to the now-empty grave of her husband, D.H. Wroten. The land under his concrete vault began to erode in December, so Willey plucked the whole thing up with a small crane. The vault now sits on the ground nearby, a strange sight in a cemetery full of them.

Willey, a retired Marine who is now a real estate agent, said he has spent $30,000 on the project but needs much more help from donors and volunteers. He wants contractors to place chunks of cement along a long stretch of the graveyard as a stopgap to erosion. A sign he puts out front says, "Please help save history."

"Every one of these people that's buried here, there's a story to be told about every single one of them," he said.

There are at least 100 people in the cemetery, he estimates, including whites whose tombstones date to 1805 and African Americans whose graves are often marked only by shallow depressions in the earth.

But fights such as Willey's are hard to win. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers doesn't generally protect cemeteries on private property, and little funding appears to be available from other parts of government. One exception could come this year in Virginia, where a state delegate has proposed allocating $25,000 for the Jenkins Neck cemetery.

There is no sign of relief. Over the next few decades, rising sea levels could make floods worse in places such as Alexandria and Annapolis. Within a century, scientists say, sizable chunks of the Eastern Shore could be submerged, including much of Dorchester. U.S. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), echoing some researchers, said he believes that Maryland is one of the states with the most to lose from sea level rise.

Still, efforts to save cemeteries go on. Historians worry that losing them would mean losing windows to the past -- how people lived, died and were buried. To others, the imperative is a moral one -- a belief that something is owed.

"It is the body, and the body does return to the earth," said Bertina T. Wilson of Heathsville, Va., about 130 miles from Washington at the mouth of the Potomac River. She is trying to raise $40,000 to put up a concrete wall to keep the Potomac out of a family cemetery that includes former slaves. "But, on the other hand, you need to be responsible for where you have laid them, and you don't want to lose that."