How to Save This (and other) Historic Cemeteries
It’s become clear that we don’t have much history on the Woodwards, and we also don’t have many connections between them and the towns of Ridgeway and Winnsboro. So what are we supposed to do with this cemetery that sits on the side of the highway? There are a few steps we can take to make this back into a historical location, instead of some 10-minute roadside stop for bloggers once a decade.
Go there. No one wants to be the only person to set foot in a cemetery in years. When you visit a cemetery, you work to normalize others visiting. It’s why I stopped at this cemetery to take pictures…who would want to read this article if I hadn’t? So make the cemetery a destination, and people will go to see what it has to offer.
Make a story out of it. One of the most important things I try to do in blog posts is tell a story. People like stories! They make sense to us. I tried to tell you a story with this series of pages. If you can tell a story about the people in the cemetery, there will be other who want to listen.
Do what you can to improve the cemetery. This can mean a variety of things — removing brush from the area, physically cleaning headstones and grave markers, etc. When I went to this cemetery, I had to jump over the short wall surrounding the graves because the gate to get in was overgrown and rusted shut. It should be obvious that pretty, clean spaces are inviting to people. So ensure that your cemetery is, too!
Digitize what can be digitized. When I visited the cemetery in person, I took dozens of photographs. You’ve only seen a few of them in these pages, but all the others have helped me in writing this. When we put the text of graves, plaques, memorials, etc. online, we make that information more accessible to everyone. And hopefully it could drive some people to want to visit in person.
Work with others. Whether you know it or not, there are others who want the same thing as you — the continued existence of this cemetery. There are national, state, and local bodies dedicated to good historical preservation. And that’s not even getting into the groups of hobbyists and amateur historians who want to do this work.
To finish this section, I just want to give you a point of comparison. The image on the left comes from the site findagrave.com, and was taken in 2008. On the right is my own image, taken in 2020.
We can do better than this. For the sake of the people buried in this cemetery, we have to do better than this. So please: do what you can to honor the history that surrounds you. It’s the duty that we have not just to ourselves, but to everyone who will come after us and learn from what we choose to preserve.