“I am developing a taste for walking in cemeteries.”

— Jules Renard, “Journals” (December 1909)

Like Jules Renard, a turn-of-the-century French novelist, many of us become attracted to cemeteries as we grow older. When looking for a quiet place, I often visit my local cemetery up on Schoolhouse Hill in Bryson City to take in the view of the town and surrounding mountains.

Once a year or so I’ll take a look at the marker on writer Horace Kephart’s gravesite or wander over and read the epitaph composed for Mark Cathey, probably the most noted fly fisherman the Smokies region has ever produced:

“Beloved Hunter and Fisherman

Was himself caught by the Gospel Hook just

Before the season closed for good.”

Those lines never fail to cheer me up. And I have no doubt that “Uncle” Mark — as he was known to about everyone in Swain County before his death in 1944 — has a good chuckle over them himself from time to time.

So, to get to the point, when some years ago I happened upon Camille Wells’ book Canton: The Architecture of Our Home Town (Canton Historical Commission in 1985) and read therein the section devoted to Locust Field Cemetery, I couldn’t resist making a visit to Canton for a stroll around the grounds.

Situated on the crest of a ridge southeast of Canton’s downtown area, the cemetery is open and windswept, affording a panoramic view of the encompassing mountain ranges. The old-time settlers generally had an unerring eye for locating homes, barns, villages, and other essential sites, and they didn’t miss the mark when deciding to bury their beloved dead on this high vantage point.

It is a stark yet ethereal setting. A visit there pretty quickly gets you into a spiritual frame of mind, which is, of course, one of the objectives of formal cemeteries. They are, after all, in the final analysis, ceremonial grounds set aside as much for the living as the dead.

“To the casual observer, Locust Field appears to be largely an early 20th century cemetery,” Wells wrote. “A river rock and cement arch, erected around 1920, punctuates the entrance and the northernmost corner of the cemetery, and visually dominates the site. Furthermore, a majority of the gravestones and furniture, such as curbs, steps, fences, and boundary markers date from the years between 1910 and 1930. There is some irony in this: the period during which Canton’s population was growing most rapidly was also the time when the burial ground was most heavily utilized.”

But, Wells cautioned, “This first impression is misleading” because Locust Field is in fact reputed to be “the oldest graveyard in Haywood County,” with a legend attached to its beginning that dates the first burial there of a wandering soldier back during the Revolutionary War. Wells found this “somewhat improbable” but acknowledged, “It is possible that the cemetery predates the 1803 establishment of Locust Old Field Baptist Church.”

Since the term “old field” indicated “areas that had been cleared and occupied by the native Indian population,” Wells speculated that the site may have been occupied first by the Indians and then later used by the first white settlers for burials. That would make the term “ceremonial ground” as applied to Locust Field doubly resonant.

At any rate, Wells continued, “the cemetery contains gravestones fashioned according to every style that was popular in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, but the most important stones are the some thirty markers that were carved from hand from local sandstone and granite. The legible stones date from as early as 1817, and there is reason to conclude that this surviving group represents only a fraction of the original assemblage. All of the markers were erected during decades before the railroad made a wider range of materials and craftsmanship available to Pigeon River residents, and they are the results of a sequestered community’s attempts to provide for its own needs.”

Wells noted that there are many markers “with irregular shapes, simple embellishments, or uneven lettering, demonstrating that there were limits to the stonemasons’ skills or to available tools. Some spellings, such as ‘bornd,’ `Roady,’ or ‘Sary’ provide evidence of pronunciations common to these mountain people. In other cases, misspellings and misaligned letters — such as a backward N or J — indicate that accomplished literacy was not yet important or available to these nineteenth century farmers.”

One can only agree with this excellent local historian’s closing assessment: “Most of the gravestones bear names like Smathers, Medford, Cabe, Reno, Hall, and Haynes that are still familiar in Canton today, and it is this fact that most directly demonstrates the importance of these crumbling markers. They represent a continuity between Canton’s recent history as a densely settled industrial town with access to and ties with the outside world, and Pigeon River’s more distant past as an isolated agrarian community where fields and woodland — and a sleepy shallow river — dominated the sparsely populated mountain landscape.”

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.