Recently I took a side trip to the Lakewood Historical Society‘s herb garden. Seem like an odd place to go for a cemetery blogger? Not when you know that the herb garden has tombstones.
The six tombstones took a lengthy journey to end up here. (It looks like seven, but one monument has broken into two pieces.)
They started out in the Wagar family cemetery, chronicling the deaths of the early pioneers of East Rockport, now known as Lakewood. The first recorded burial on the Wagar property was in 1826; the last in 1894.
The cemetery was abandoned in the 1920s and suffered from years of neglect. Tombstones were destroyed or moved when families reburied their dead in newer plots. Eighty-four persons remained there at the time the cemetery was dismantled.
The remains of the pioneers these markers memorialized were exhumed in the late 1950s and 1960s to make way for construction and reburied in Lakewood Park Cemetery, but the markers did not travel with them. The markers ended up in a local park behind a service garage, subject to vandalism.
Finally, the local historical society acquired the tombstones and enshrined them in the herb garden behind the oldest stone house in the city, where they are at least more preserved and protected and can be studied.
A Grave Concern 