Alan Kim | The Roanoke Times

Joyce Hendricks reads the inscription on a headstone she uncovered after knocking down vegetation that was cleared in 1998.

Get involved

• For more information or to help preserve Montgomery County cemeteries, e-mail Joyce Hendricks or call 951-2188. There also will be a public meeting at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Price’s Fork Elementary School to discuss cemetery preservation.

Burial in a private cemetery

• Did you know you can be buried almost anywhere on Montgomery County land that is zoned as agricultural? If you wish to be buried in a family cemetery or start your own cemetery, no permit is required. Burial spots just have to be 100 feet from any well and 900 feet from property owned by any city, town or water company. Also, if the burial spot is within 750 feet of your neighbor’s property, you have to ask permission. Kenneth McCoy of McCoy Funeral Home said about half of his business goes to small family cemeteries.

As Joyce Hendricks pushed aside yucca plants and crushed poison ivy with her sneakered heels, she squinted into a thick tangle of weeds.

"I wonder if there's another tombstone over there," she said.

At the more than 2-century-old grave site, nature has taken over. Thorned plants wait menacingly to catch on clothes or skin and vines threaten to entangle trespassers.

It's impossible to walk through the dense snarl without weaving and ducking.

"This is the state of so many cemeteries," Hendricks said. "Most of them are inactive or abandoned."

There are 320 known cemeteries in Montgomery County, and Hendricks said she regularly discovers more as people stumble upon small family plots that are deserted or forgotten.

Hendricks is eight years into a mission to help care for abandoned cemeteries and document the people buried in them. Soon she'll team with Virginia Tech professor Anita Puckett, the Daughters of the American Revolution and Montgomery County offices to protect and keep up cemeteries, provide a historical view of the cemetery population and create genealogical records.

Hanging on a wall in Hendricks' Blacksburg home is a 6-by-7-foot map of Montgomery County, freckled with 320 green, red and yellow stickers. The red stickers represent the cemeteries that have been recorded, the green represent the cemeteries she's visited and the yellow represent those she's never visited.

"We don't go bar-hopping in our family; we go cemetery hopping," the mother of nine said jokingly.

On a table next to the map lay Hendricks' "cemetery index," two binders with hundreds of pages about local grave sites. She hopes to put the information online so people can easily find where someone is buried.

Hendricks became interested in genealogy and cemeteries when she worked with her church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in 1999 to clean up and document graveyards.

Hendricks and other volunteers in Blacksburg mowed, trimmed weeds and recorded names and dates at about 30 cemeteries. It wasn't long before periwinkle and blackberry plants reclaimed the territory.

"I can't believe how bad it's gotten in only eight years," she said.

The cemetery on Boxwood Drive in Blacksburg is landlocked between two private properties. Bob Van Luyn, who owns 7.9 adjacent acres, said people rarely visit the cemetery, which has stones dating to 1762.

Hendricks said most abandoned cemeteries once belonged to the families of those buried there.

"When a family leaves the area or they get too old to take care of it, nobody takes it over," she said.

The county's cemetery records are spotty at best.

Renee Chapman, who helps keep the tax maps for Montgomery County, said the county didn't record abandoned cemeteries until the 1970s because they're not taxed. Since then, cemeteries have been recorded as the county becomes aware of them. State law prohibits the destruction of cemeteries, but unrecorded ones have been accidently destroyed.

Tom Klatka, a regional archaeologist for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, helped uncover the history of a destroyed slave cemetery on Virginia Tech's Kentland Farm. Members of the Wake Forest community, many whom are descendants of those buried at Kentland Farm, said about 300 slaves were thought to be buried on the farm. No one is sure how or when the headstones disappeared.

To determine the location and to verify the cemetery's existence, Klatka teamed with Tech professors and students to dig shallow holes in the areas where members of the Wake Forest community remembered seeing tombstones. They found discolored soil in the shape of caskets and two small pieces of limestone that were probably grave markers, because limestone doesn't occur naturally in Blacksburg.

Tech acquired Kentland Farm in 1987 and in 2005 built a memorial for those buried there.

The oral history of Wake Forest helped preserve the memory of those buried at Kentland Farm, but the history behind many of Montgomery County's abandoned cemeteries is in danger of being permanently lost.

Puckett, director of Appalachian Studies at Tech, hopes to prevent that by gathering and documenting the area's oral history. With the help of a $4,000 grant, she will organize 10 to 15 students to interview descendants of those buried in the approximately 65 cemeteries in northwest Montgomery County and pass on the stories to the community.

To understand the area's history is to understand what it is today, Puckett said.

"You can't have community without having time for people to face-to-face interact and create their own ways of doing things," she said. "It's in the graveyard where these things are grounded in place."

In some cases, descendants care for an old cemetery.

Bob Wall helps take care of his family cemetery on Prices Fork Road. His great-great-grandfather was buried at the cemetery in 1860, and his father, cousins, aunts and uncles are buried at the site.

When Wall's father died in 1988, he left money to help pay for the cemetery's upkeep, but the money fell short of the upkeep costs. Though the Walls cleared the cemetery last fall, it's still overgrown and some of the tombstones have toppled. Wall said the cemetery is most threatened by groundhogs, which have a tendency to burrow under the cemetery vaults. Wall said he and his family plan to revitalize the cemetery soon.

"It needs some major work, at least the way I look at it," Wall said.

The Walls' cemetery is in better shape than many in Montgomery County; some haven't been checked on for years, or even decades.

At a 7 p.m. meeting Tuesday at Price's Fork Elementary School, people can meet with Hendricks and others to discuss preserving the cemeteries. The group hopes to inspire enough interest in certain cemeteries so others will help maintain them.

"There are a lot of cemeteries that are at the point where the wildlife is just taking them over," Hendricks said. "Several people are very worried."