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.