OBX resident begins campaign to clean up Hatteras Island graves
AVON, N.C. — Avon resident Dawn Taylor is on a quest to clean up Hatteras Island cemeteries populated with some of the oldest Outer Banks names like Scarborough and Gray.
It is a long, difficult task. The North Carolina barrier islands are tough on graveyards.
Burial plots flood often and unchecked vegetation grows like a tropical jungle. The Pamlico Sound has eroded away shorelines where souls once rested. Wind-blown sand buries headstones and salty, humid air wears away at names etched on granite.
Taylor, 53, started 10 years ago with a burial site of about a quarter-acre on her father’s property in Avon nearly consumed by briers, yaupon bushes, unruly live oaks and sand.
“We came in here with lopping shears and started a path,” she said. “We spent hours, weeks, years working on this.”
She recently created the Hatteras Island Archives website and Facebook page to document local history, get reports on needy graveyards and enlist other volunteers. A GoFundMe account has garnered $900 and she has received other donations by mail, she said. Several have offered to labor with her.
Taylor and her friend David Padgett have nearly completed work on the graveyard in Avon, historically known as Kinnakeet. The brush is gone and the sand dug away. Old, twisting live oaks, now with pruned limbs, shade the site and block the wind. An attractive wooden sign stands at the entrance that says Price-Scarborough Cemetery. It’s like a little park now.
She and Padgett still need to straighten a few leaning headstones.
Taylor, a potter by trade, has also cleared cemeteries in Buxton where her direct ancestors lie. She helps maintain an obscure graveyard north of Avon with 13 markers on property owned by the National Park Service, next to the Pamlico Sound.
The deceased were washed away by the encroaching sound and the gravestones were moved from the water to a small hill within a live oak grove.
Finding burial plots is almost as hard as clearing them.
Amy Gamiel and Lois Meekins tried to document every graveyard in Dare County in the 1990s. They published their findings 20 years ago in a hardcover book called “Sacred To Their Memory: Dare County, N.C. Cemeteries.”
They found more than 150 cemeteries just on Hatteras Island. Some were well maintained and some were not. Gamiel’s father told her at the time that there were many graves not included in the book. Nearly every family buried people on their property, but the gravestones often went missing.
Very old graves were marked with wooden head stones that are long decomposed, Taylor said. As families left, some graveyards were left behind unattended.
Dozens more now are in danger of disappearing and the people forgotten, Taylor said. That was almost the case with the Avon cemetery she cleared.
Buried there is Esther Morgan, who died in 1918 at age 11, possibly of the Spanish flu, the deadly pandemic of that time.
As Taylor and Padgett cleared away the brush, they spotted white stone barely protruding from the ground. They dug around it to discover it was the top of Morgan’s foot stone. They found the headstone close by buried under 12 inches of sand and leaves.
Julia Scarborough lies buried at the backside of the area, but no one else, including her husband, is next to her. His grave may be close by, but the marker is gone. He died shortly after the Civil War, according to Taylor’s research.
Sand dug decades ago from a nearby canal might be covering other graves and markers, she said.
The gravestone of the most prominent occupant, Rev. A.W. Price, was covered in vines and brush, but now stands prominently near the front. Price died in 1937 after preaching in the area for decades, Taylor said.
At the Avon cemetery Tuesday, Taylor used two copper rods as dowsers — a controversial ancient practice used to find hidden objects — in her search for unmarked graves.
The rods began moving, indicating to Taylor that someone was buried a few feet from Julia. To be certain, a friend has volunteered a ground penetrating radar to find more graves and verify those found by the rods, she said. They will not know who lies there, but at least the grave can get marked.
“We hope our ancestors know we’re trying to save their resting places,” she said. “We need more help.”