My English college Professor knew enough about me from the papers I’d turned in, that I was into abandoned buildings and history. One day during class, he told a story about an abandoned church and the old cemetery next to it located in Hiddenite, NC. It was the town he grew up in, so he knew the area well and shared with me its location.
Within a few days, I was turning onto the old road bed, right where he told me to look for it. I left my car near the road and walked the rest of the way in. Trees kept the church and headstones concealed from the main road so i wasn’t sure what to expect when I turned up a small hill. The woods opened up into a very old, partially hidden cemetery that I could tell was being maintained by someone. It was full of rudimentary headstones made of rough stones, as well as polished headstones of confederate soldiers. Many grave markers were just a small rock, with no indication of whose final resting place it was.
In the early 1800s, Thomas Edison sent a mineralogist, William Hidden, to NC in search of platinum. Hidden found a gemstone that became known as Hiddenite. It’s the only precious gemstone that cannot be synthesized and up until recently, could only be found in this county in the entire world (later it was discovered in Brazil and Madagascar). Prior to the town being named after the gemstone, it was known as White Plains on an 1871 map.
In 1808, a citizen of White Plains named Joseph Sharpe set aside a plot of ground to be used as a common burying ground. Later Hopewell Methodist Church was built here and the burying ground became known as Hopewell Cemetery.
A particular group of headstones caught my attention with an inscribed name of John Connoly (1839 – 1911) standing taller than the much smaller ones nearby. Beside him was his wife, Annette (1848 – 1892)) and their six children, all of which died before their sixth birthdays, 2 of them they buried just 2 days apart. Six months after giving birth to her sixth child, Annette passed away from pancreatic cancer at the age of 44 in 1892.
That same year, John Connolly married Julia Bunton (1860 – 1945)) and she gave birth to his 7th child, who died when she was 3 days old. She gave birth again to a son Julia gave birth to a son that died in 1901. John Connolly passed away 10 yrs. later, in 1911, after burying 8 children and one wife. His epitaph reads, “no pain no grief no anxious fear can reach our loved ones resting here”. His wife Julia passed away in 1945. Each tombstone also had a small foot stone with each child’s initials engraved on it.
I researched common diseases in North Carolina during those few decades to try and understand how and why this poor family lost all of their babies. There were several epidemics/pandemics specific to NC at that time, including diphtheria. In 1887 diphtheria was listed as the 3rd most important cause of death in the state. The year 1889 was a particularly bad one for malaria, polio wasn’t a huge problem until the early half of the 1900s, although it still could’ve been a contributing factor, and smallpox was problematic from the early 1700s through the mid 1950s. There was also tuberculosis, typhoid fever, typhus, and yellow fever.
It must’ve been so traumatic for them, digging one tiny grave after another, to lay their sleeping children in. Before they were done grieving the loss of one child, they were burying another.
I looked up this cemetery on Findagrave, and was happy to find I was able to contribute ten of my headstone photos to their database that were previously missing.
