ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 2, 1996 TAG: 9612020008
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: GLEN WILTON
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
Progress has hit a snag in this wee mountain settlement in northern Botetourt County.
It happened a few weeks ago, on Halloween. A worker for Prillaman & Pace Contractors of Martinsville was happily digging along near Main Street, making a trench in which to lay part of a new sewer system, when a man walked up and said, "You know, if you keep digging in that direction, you're going to hit a graveyard."
"The guy doing the digging thought it was a prank," said Nickie Mills of Engineering Concepts in Fincastle, which is overseeing the project. There were no headstones, no grave markers of any kind. And it was Halloween.
But the cautious contractor was concerned enough to tell Engineering Concepts. And after a series of interviews and a consultation with an expert, everyone was satisfied that there is, in fact, a graveyard.
It's probably 150 years old, and no one knows whose bones are buried there. It's hard to tell where it begins and ends. A house appears to be built over part of it. But it's a cemetery, nonetheless.
And the $900,000 sewer project is going to have to go around it, with a wide berth.
"Looking at it now, it looks like it could be a cemetery," Mills said. It sits on a little rise, and there's a wrought-iron fence around it. "It would make a great cemetery fence," he said.
Of course, that never occurred to anybody before now. Mills said before the digging for the sewer system started, a series of town meetings was held to make sure there wasn't anything in the ground that didn't show up on land records. No one mentioned the graveyard.
"I didn't know that's where the sewer was going," said Everett Tucker Sr. Tucker and his children seem to be the only people in Glen Wilton who remember the cemetery. It was Tucker's son who warned the contractor on Halloween.
Tucker, who says he once was something of an amateur archaeologist, remembers seeing some crudely carved headstones in the corner of the lot when he moved to Glen Wilton 30 years ago.
Change rarely comes to Glen Wilton. The dogs run loose here, and everybody knows everybody else. It's quiet, too, except for when a train rambles through next to Main Street. When the train whistle blows, all the dogs start to howl.
Buddy Reynolds has lived in Glen Wilton all of his 84 years. He remembers running down to the telegraph station to get World Series game updates in the 1920s. He remembers the small-gauge railroad that used to bring the Lynchburg paper to town. He remembers when a nearby gunpowder plant exploded in 1942 and killed two men.
But, try as he might, he can't remember any graveyard. Empirical evidence has swayed him, though.
"They brought in a grave finder," he said.
That would be David Norris of Norris Funeral Home in Martinsville. Norris, who has supervised the moving of about 1,000 graves, poked around the site with a probing rod looking for depressions and signs of earth that has been moved. He found some evidence of that, but for him, the most convincing evidence was the fact that the place just looks like a graveyard. That wrought-iron fence is tough to ignore, even if some of the graves appear to be outside of it.
Norris' findings and interviews with Tucker and his children persuaded the engineers to redesign the sewer around the graveyard. That makes Tucker happy.
"I hope I did some of my civic duty," he said. "I'd hate to see a graveyard torn up."
The changes will add about $10,000 to the cost of the sewer, which is funded primarily by a Community Development Block Grant. The new route won't add much extra line to the sewer, Mills said, but new manholes, which are custom-built, will have to be ordered.
Hindsight is beginning to haunt Mills.
"Next time I design a sewer," he said, "I'll be more aware of wrought-iron fences."
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Map.by CNB