Cedar Grove Cemetery - Asper Gravesite

One day, I will add an entry or two about Cedar Grove Cemetery in Chambersburg which has some old gravestones, a few of which deserve their own entries. Like this one.

The most interesting grave marker I happened across in Cedar Gove is that of Burt Jacob Asper, a lieutenant and a surgeon, in the United States Naval Medical Corps in 1918 when he died, lost at sea as a crew member on the U.S.S. Cyclops. The Cyclops was a Proteus-class collier (basically a large (542' long) ship which carried coal used to re-supply coal burning ships) launched in 1910. Upon the United States' entry into World War One, the Cyclops saw service in the Atlantic, spending most of her time along the east coast of the U.S.

In early 1918, the Cyclops was sent to Brazil to pick up manganese ore and return it to Baltimore for use in munitions manufacturing. There are conflicting reports concerning whether she was overloaded and an unscheduled stop the Cyclops made in Barbados seems to support that she was having some trouble with the load she carried. Whatever the case, sometime between March 4 and March 13, the day she was due in Baltimore, the Cyclops disappeared. No wreckage was ever located and no trace of the 309 crewmen was ever found. It remains the largest, non-combat-related loss of life in U.S. Navy history.

What does this add up to: Barbados, disappearing into thin air with all hands on deck, no trace of wreckage?? The Bermuda Triangle, of course! Virtually every book written on the Bermuda Triangle includes a chapter on the Cyclops and its photo has become familiar to anyone even remotely familiar with the lore of the Triangle.

Even though, Lt. Asper's final resting place is somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean with his shipmates, he's remembered in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, with a grave marker he shares with his parents.

Hessian Cemetery

A couple of years ago, a friend turned me on to a Hessian graveyard that she chanced upon during a hike in State Game Land 235, west of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. In April 2007, I took a friend and my dogs, parked at the end of Horse Valley Road and started walking down a gated old woods road. We walked for a mile or more (I neglected to take a pedometer with me) and began to worry that we might have missed it as the only directions I'd received were 'keep walking until there's a right turn.' So, keep walking we did.

My concern about missing the graveyard was finally allayed when we came upon a sign, a literal sign. In the middle of nowhere. Indeed, the sign was at a spot where another, less-travelled woods road came in from the right. Although there was no sign of the cemetery, we were encouraged and started up the hill.

After several more minutes, we spotted a large American flag on the right. I still find it odd that an American flag marked a Hessian cemetery but I have no better alternative. They were ultimately Americans after all. What they had been (German mercenaries) didn't change what they had become (Americans in a newly-formed country).

I was a little disappointed when I saw the graveyard. The sign and the flag had me expecting legible gravestones, maybe a rock wall denoting the perimeter, or at least something, anything, that resembled a cemetery. In fact, there is little that remains of the burial sites and, without the identifying sign and flag, I never would have found the place. The graveyard itself is on a plateau on a low hill, surrounded by young trees. Since it was April when we visited, there was little vegetation so I don't know if it becomes overgrown later in the season or whether anyone maintains it.

Here and there, what appear to be remnants of headstones peak above the ground but all that remain are broken, none are legible and a few could simply be rocks. Here and there, a depression in the ground gives a clue about the possible location of a possible grave.

The most disappointing thing about the Hessian cemetery is that I've found absolutely nothing about the history of the site or the people that lived in the surrounding area. I can guess, of course. After the Revolutionary War, German soldiers hired as mercenaries by the British likely settled in the area, probably farming Horse Valley. Even during the Revolution, German immigrants were common in Pennsylvania. William Penn is known to have made trips to Germany to recruit new followers to the Quaker faith. In the 1790 census, while roughly 9% of Americans were of German descent, more than 30% of the residents of Pennsylvania were German. This was apparently bolstered by the roughly 5,000 Hessian soldiers that chose to remain in the United States after the war ended. I think it would have been fairly easily for a Hessian to take off his uniform and be assimilated into the pre-existing Pennsylvania 'Dutch' community.

The only thing that gives me pause about the story of an early-American dream is the location of Horse Valley which seems remote even by today's standards. It's a very narrow flat land west of Chambersburg, north of Fort Loudoun, hemmed in by tall (for this area), rocky mountains. It couldn't have been an easy journey for supplies. If I can ever find more info about the area and it's early settlers, I'd love to take another trip to the graveyard and see it with new eyes.

While we didn't stay long (as there wasn't much to see), the walk was enjoyable and I felt like I'd seen something few people get to see or even know about. April was a great time to go as frogs had already laid their eggs and we found huge masses of squiggily tadpoles filling the narrow runoff streams along the road. The leaves had not yet emerged and it gave us the opportunity to see past the treeline and see the creek which might otherwise be hidden.

Rocky Spring Presbyterian Church

I thought I would start this blog with my favorite cemetery: Rocky Spring Presbyterian Church in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Why is it my fave?

First, it is located just north of the town of Chambersburg, adjacent to Letterkenny Army Depot, which also places it relatively close to where I live. Since I moved to the Chambersburg area 8 years ago, the little town has seen an outlandish amount of growth, spurred, in part, by national retailers, such as Target, building humongous distribution warehouses along Interstate 81. When I first moved here from the Washington, D.C. metro area, Chambersburg still had a bit of a backwater feel. There was little traffic and one could drive for miles through open farm land. Now, housing developments dot the once-stunning landscape and traffic is no picnic.

The location of Rocky Spring is really special. Not far from a heavily-travelled highway, the road on which the church is located meanders past some older farmhouses, an apple orchard and even a very small trailer park but the church and cemetery are almost by themselves along a curving section just past the orchard. Every time I park along the small, one-car sized pull off, I feel like I’m a hundred miles away from anyone else.

Second, you can feel the history associated with Rocky Spring as soon as you walk up the little rise on which the church sits. The large red brick building was erected in 1794 but the congregation was authorized to build its original log church in 1738 according to History of the Rocky Spring Presbyterian Church and Addresses Delivered at the Centennial Anniversary of the Present Church Edifice, August 23, 1894. Many of those early settlers buried in the cemetery battled the native residents for the right to farm the surrounding land and then watched their children join the battle for the burgeoning nation’s freedom. Quite a number of the men’s gravestones are accompanied by Revolutionary War markers and several of those men went on to further serve the young country in public service roles. Reading the headstones reminds me that the foundations of this country were not focused solely on Philadelphia and Boston – how many of these little communities, forgotten to time, must there have been?

Also, Sarah Wilson (b. 1795 d. 1871) is entombed at Rocky Spring. Another name forgotten to larger history, Sarah Wilson lent her name (and large donations) to the private, liberal arts Wilson College. Wilson College was one of the first higher learning institutions in the U.S. to accept only women. Each year, the young women from the college make a pilgrimage to Rocky Spring and pay tribute to the college’s namesake.

Finally, I could talk about the beauty of the site and the large trees that dot the landscape but I think the photos speak for themselves. Instead, I will choose as my final favorite thing is that Martha Stewart is buried at Rocky Spring. Okay, not that Martha Stewart (I hope) but can’t you see the present-day Martha Stewart designing a setting like this for her final resting place?

I discovered Rocky Spring several years ago and, every year since, I return and walk through, reading the gravestones again. I understand that the Daughters of the American Revolution own the property and pay for the upkeep. For that, I am grateful.