After three weeks of searching for cemeteries in Shenandoah National Park, I was still stunned by how much the trails could change in mere days. When I first arrived, most of the trees and bushes were nearly bare, and it was easy to find old ruins and gravestones. Now, the foliage is denser, and the forest is overtaking everything.

As I hiked alongside the babbling brook in the dying light of day, parts of the path were thick with tall grass and bugs. The bugs swarmed me when I stopped to look at my map or take a drink of water. But I was struggling to find the old, hidden graveyard, so I must stop and hope there’d be something of me left once the bugs finished. I looked around at the narrow trail, once a road, stretching out before and behind me like a tightrope. Lush green covered everything, and my map was useless. The graveyard, if there was one, was staying hidden.

I visited the park during my two-year road trip as a nomad, traveling in my van, hiking, seeing historic areas, and staying in short-term rentals.

When I rented a little white cottage for a month-long stay near the Shenandoah National Park, I didn’t know much about the park. Certainly not that it had once been home to hundreds of displaced families, and definitely not that it had dozens of abandoned graveyards within its borders. Then, I also didn’t realize how much a park could change in one month or that I’d find myself often in its depths seeking signs of its lost people.

The Spirits of Shenandoah National Park

My cottage sits just outside the middle of the 100-mile-long park. From the porch, I can watch the sun rise across the Shenandoah Valley and set behind the Blue Ridge Mountains. When I first arrived, I thought I was mostly alone in the broad valley, but now I know the spirits of the park surround me. After a month, I saw many signs of the people who lived here before the government took their land. 

I’ve been to over 30 U.S. national parks, but Shenandoah National Park was different in a way I’d never have suspected. On my first visit, I stopped on Skyline Drive and got out of my van to admire the view. Skyline Drive is a 100-mile scenic road going through the center of the 80,000-acre park. From there, you can see east and west as far as your eyes allow. The park’s elevation is 550 feet at its lowest and over 4,049 feet at its highest, and it contains over 500 miles of trails. There are waterfalls, a part of the Appalachian Trail, and endless vistas.

I walked over to the low brick wall that trails the entirety of the park and sat on it with my feet dangling over the side. Three thousand feet above the wilderness, I looked off into the distance. Small towns were just beginning to turn on their lights, preparing for the night. The day was fading, and the sky was beginning its daily light show. I watched the clouds converge and their colors shift from blue to pink, purple, orange and a last burst of yellow before fading into oblivion.

A Whisper From the Past

Nearby, I spotted a sign. It had a few pictures and said, “Just below, deep in the woods of Beldor Hollow, there are cemeteries, relics of the people who once called these hills home. Descendants of those buried live just outside the park boundary and carry on the names chiseled into the stones of their ancestors’ resting places. … Cemeteries throughout the park stand as quiet sentinels reminding us of those who have lived here ….”

What, I wondered, was this place? As a taphophile, I frequently visit cemeteries and graveyards, but I didn’t expect to find any here in the national park. Of course, now that I knew they existed, I needed to learn where. To my surprise, I realized they were everywhere.

Eminent Domain in the Shenandoah Valley

In 1935, the government used eminent domain to displace over 450 families to build Shenandoah National Park. They took their lands and their graveyards. The National Park Service knows of about 100 cemeteries in the park, but there could be many other burial grounds, too. As a cemetery and history lover, I was intrigued, but the history and the cemeteries were harder to find than I had ever imagined.

After exploring the park’s lower 50 miles and going on several hikes, I found an old cabin, many brick walls, and a few old graveyards, some still active. Each bit of history I learned led to another question, and finally, the past started to reveal itself.

Dean Cemetery in Shenandoah National Park

The easiest cemetery to find is the Dean Cemetery because it’s still active and has signs and a parking lot – yes, an active cemetery in a national park. The National Park Service manages 14 national cemeteries and hundreds of historic sites and monuments that contain buried remains, but this is the only national park I’m aware of with active cemeteries inside its borders. Mammoth Cave National Park has more than 80 cemeteries and family plots; Great Smoky Mountain National Park has at least 150 cemeteries, and Yosemite has one, but none are still active.

The Dean Cemetery is a quiet, solemn plot off Skyline Drive. After a short walk down a dirt road, the little cemetery comes into view much like any other. Here, ancient headstones mix with those only a few years old. The oldest grave markers are bare, once hand-carved, but the lettering has long worn off, leaving what seems to be only a fieldstone.

Family Cemeteries of Shenandoah

The families must maintain their cemeteries; if they stop, the park service will allow natural vegetative succession to reclaim the sites. It will not take action to slow or abate the process. Park bylaws state that only descendants of family members may be buried there, and once all grave sites within the designated boundary are filled, burials will cease.

The park says there are more than 100 known cemeteries in Shenandoah, and several are still active within the park, but many others are returning to the earth, and few are easily located. There aren’t any public maps of their locations.

I stood quietly and wondered about the Dean graveyard, imagining how it looked before the national park took over and what it might look like 100 years from now. Shadows danced in the trees as I walked back to my van.

Fox Hollow Graveyard

On the northern side of the park, the trail to Fox Hollow was muddy and green with Virginia creeper but otherwise easy to navigate. The Fox family’s old homestead is only 1.5 miles off Skyline Drive, where most of the trails start. It had been raining heavily and the day was overcast. I followed a couple at a distance as I ventured into the wet forest but lost them when I stopped to examine a large pile of stones. The rocks had once been the foundations of tiny homes.

Most of the stones looked like random piles stacked in piles, with mushrooms and other fungi growing from them. Some still held the shape of walls or homes. These are the only fragments of these old places, and they’re quickly sinking back into the earth. They’re so derelict now that if you didn’t know what you were looking at, it’d be easy to overlook the clues entirely.

Further down, I found an old well. For hundreds of feet, the trail stayed wet, and handmade rock walls, once animal pens, lined the path. At a distance, I found a low triangle-shaped rock wall with old fieldstones and grave markers within it. I entered through the opening in the wall.

Cemeteries in Shenandoah National Park

Fox Cemetery

Inside the graveyard were about five readable gravestones from the early 1900s. The inscriptions on several smaller, more crudely made stones were no longer legible. Brambles and vines overgrew and obscured the shape of the cemetery. Large gaps indicated there may have been other stones, now gone. A few others lay broken, face down. I was tempted to right them but didn’t. One day soon, this will be entirely covered over. Those walls, chimneys, and gravestones are the most visible remnants of the people who once lived here.

How Shenandoah National Park Began

After a month of exploring the park, I was stumped why the government had taken so much land. When I think of other national parks like Yellowstone, Redwood, Olympic, Death Valley, Grand Teton, Arches, Saguaro, and many others, this one seems needlessly large and without any significant reason. Other very large parks protect rare or endangered features, animals, flora, or aspects of the geography. In Shenandoah, there isn’t much variation in the landscape, no rare features, or protected species. What it has is the ruins and cemeteries of Shenandoah from so many displaced families. Yes, it’s beautiful, undeveloped land, but why so much?

I read that President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted a national park like those in the West, close to Washington D.C., to use as a showcase for fundraising efforts. Once politicians determined the location, they only needed to remove the families. Most, if not all, national parklands were once home to Indigenous people, mostly American Indians, so the government displacement isn’t unique. Still, the remaining active cemeteries in Shenandoah make it unusual.

The Mountain People of Jones Mountain

Reports chronicling the history of the mountain people who lived there paint a grim picture of eviction and government propaganda that not only took their homes but slandered them in the process. According to news reports, the park used to have signage that described the people of Jones Mountain as “ignorant hillbillies destroying land” while the government wanted to preserve it.

While the park service doesn’t advertise its history of displacing families to make the park, they don’t exactly hide it. At the Big Meadows visitor’s center, there’s now an exhibit on the displacement; they have scattered signage that mentions the families. Movies and books in their visitor centers are filled with historical information if you pay attention, but most don’t.

A good book about Shenandoah National Park is “Lost trails and forgotten people: The story of Jones Mountain,” by Tom Floyd. It tells the story of Shenandoah National Park from the perspective of the families, how they lived on what was then known as Jones Mountain, the way they fought to keep their land, and the bulldozers and men that came to demolish and set fire to their homes, schools and churches, forcing them out.

Pocosin Mission

At the visitor’s center, I asked a few rangers what they knew about the ruins and old cemeteries of Shenandoah. Still, they seemed hesitant to share information, saying nothing was officially documented.

“We want to respect the privacy of the families,” one ranger said of the cemeteries in Shenandoah. Still, he told me where I could find a few others. There isn’t a map that lists them all; finding them requires quite a bit of scattered research. Books and public records are the best way to find the information if you have the inclination.

Still, the rangers told me the Pocosin Mission Trail has a cemetery about 2.5 miles into the woods, next to ruins of an abandoned Episcopal mission and, alongside it, a graveyard.

I parked on a small gravel fire road and followed the signs to an abandoned cabin. While the NPS systematically destroyed and removed nearly all the old homes and buildings belonging to the people who once lived here, a few houses from the last to leave were forgotten. The Potomac Appalachian Trail Club now maintains and rents the old cabin along the Pocosin Mission Fire Road.

A Shifting Landscape in Shenandoah National Park

When I first arrived in early May, many trees and bushes were nearly bare, and it was easy to see old ruins and gravestones. After only three weeks, the difference in the state of the park was stunning. Trails once wide with expansive views were covered with vivid green, trees filling the spaces between once bare branches. The grass covering the old roads turned them into faint whispers of trails. Once I had open sightlines, I could later see only as far as the next bend in the road.

Wildflowers, bees, bugs and butterflies filled the valley around the cabin, and I was otherwise entirely alone. Aside from insects, I saw only a few yellow Goldfinches as they coasted past. A babbling brook stayed alongside me as I moved further onto the trail. Other than my boots intentionally kicking the gravel stones beneath me to make noise as I walked, it was blissfully silent.

As I walked alongside the babble, there were parts of the path where the grass grew tall and thick. Whenever I stopped to view my map or take a drink from my water bottle, bugs descended on me. Everything about the place seemed inhospitable. Like it held the memory of its ransacking.

The brook muffled noise from the woods and took my mind off the snapping of twigs and movement in the bushes that startled me. The trail sloped steadily downward into the hollow, and occasionally, old, hand-stacked rock walls lined the trail to mark long-forgotten property borders.

Old Ruins and Lost Lands in Shenandoah

Over two miles in, a dilapidated old shed-like cabin came into view and near to it, long concrete steps that I knew must be the Pocosin Episcopal Mission. The people living on the mountain created the mission in 1904. Besides the steps, the only remaining structure is a small foundation and a collapsed chimney with green moss covering their tops. It couldn’t have been big enough to hold more than 10 people at a time.

The rangers said the cemetery was near the trail to the left of the mission, but as I turned in a circle surveying the site, I saw other remains but no graveyard. Behind the mission, I saw an old car, rusted entirely, half buried in the earth, and covered by trees. To the left was a decrepit tin shed falling to ruin but no low stone wall or grave markers.

I followed the trail a little further, peering into and beyond the leaves, but nothing was revealing itself to me in the dusky-filtered light. There were a few spots where it looked like others must have gone off trail and I debated hacking my way through the brush. But, as a solo hiker, I’m cautious about climbing into unmarked terrain. Plus, I didn’t want to disturb any historical elements or disrespect cemeteries in Shenandoah I may stumble upon.

A Trail Back in Time

I don’t doubt the cemetery is there and had I arrived in this spot three weeks earlier, I may have found it, but in the summer, the green foliage hid many things that didn’t want to be found, and I was okay leaving them to their peace.

As I spun in a circle, surveying the land, I recalled the faces of the people in a black-and-white picture of the mission when it was active. The young children, flanked by adults, stood in quiet attention, staring directly at the photographer. What happened to them? Were any of them buried here?

There is still watchfulness in any woods, especially where people have lived and died and been forced to leave. That energy inhabits the land and settles like a fog over anyone who comes later.

After a while, I gave up the search and made my way back the way I’d come. As I walked up the trail, I thought about the people who would have lived here, built the mission, attended services, and buried their families in that hidden cemetery. They’ve walked the same trail I did and saw the same flowers, bees, butterflies and brook. Then, one day, the government told them they had to leave. It’s haunting, a place like that.

Later, when I looked at my phone, I found pictures from the trail that I didn’t take. The camera snapped several images on its own. They seem like something seen through a window darkly, distorted, and as murky as the past.  

Other Cemeteries of Shenandoah Valley

Much of the land in Shenandoah National Park might contain graves; it’s not limited to the park. Before colonialization, indigenous people lived here too. After, many rural families had homes and graveyards across the valley and ridge that may be long forgotten.

My host, from whom I rented the cottage, said that his family used to believe a mound in the back of the property was an old graveyard. In the spot he indicated, I saw random, weatherworn fieldstones, perhaps another of the cemeteries in Shenandoah.

At night, sitting on my porch, I can see only a hint of those stones. It’s so dark that the world becomes a vortex, and the only difference between a million stars in the sky and lightning bugs on the Earth is the flickering. Standing there looking out at the vista of the open prairie around me, I think this would be an excellent spot for a graveyard.

Cemeteries in Shenandoah National Park in Hindsight

I didn’t know the histories of the cemeteries in Shenandoah National Park before I visited, and I didn’t piece together much of it until after I left. Often, when I visit national parks, I’m one of few people who stop to read the signs, but this shows how essential it is that we take the time. I love having national parks, but it’s important that we understand their cost, too.

Read other stories about National Parks here.

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