Four cemeteries in one day of grueling hiking through the bush! First up is the John Murdock Cemetery.
It’s relatively small with just a handful of burials.
Look for the plants that are out of place!
We really like the Heinrich Schneider Cemetery, located relatively close by on the north side of Highway 94.
Again, there aren’t many burials, but the elegant rounded top gravestones gave a certain panache to the grounds.
Lots of tulips popping up from the forest floor.
Most cemeteries have a rudimentary barbed wire or some type of fence around them, but are usually broken down and decrepit.
Large fields, probably remnants of the farms in the area, provide broad vistas. Farmhouses were completely annihilated, but large clusters of lilies or tulips give indications of possible former locations.
The Mades Cemetery was very impressive, starting with what is certainly a Victorian Era cast iron fence that is still largely extant, with added ornament on the posts.
We tried putting the finial back on top of this obelisk but it’s damaged.
It’s a relatively small cemetery but really shines because of the ornamental fence around the outside.
Cutting across a ravine to get back to Highway 94, we passed through another former field or pasture.
South of Highway 94 only a hundred feet or so is the large church cemetery built on rugged land, which was a common use for otherwise undesirable land.
Still active, it contains graves with family names that we have seen in many of the family cemeteries lost back in the woods.
Mades is a great example, and this is a relatively recent interment.
Now Schneider is an incredibly common name in German…
Due to drainage issues, there is a rock channel through the grounds.
We really like the Scharnhorst grave, which in of itself is a very famous German name, because of the depiction of the hunting dogs.
