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CEDAR HILL CEMETERY |
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Some things were meant to be lost and are better off not found. Such is the case with Cedar Hill Cemetery - a burial ground for the forgotten, which itself was nearly lost.
Following the railroad tracks out of Havre de Grace toward the Susquehanna River, you'll come to a patch of wooded scrub on Elizabeth Street - a dead end road with more of its residents deceased than living. On that road, atop a lonely hill, an old Havre de Grace mystery is buried beneath six feet of soil.
There, beneath the leaves and brush, lies a missing piece of Havre de Grace history. Cedar Hill Cemetery - a final resting place of Civil War veterans, nameless vagabonds and a bloody murder more than 150 years old. A short scramble up a grassy hill and into a thick scrub of woods and weeds, a deer trail leads to a simple gravestone in the ground, but there is much more to be found.
There are about a dozen headstones discovered so far in Cedar Hill Cemetery - each undoubtedly with its own story, but only a handful remain standing and fewer still are legible. Some slate stones have survived the weathering of the last century and look as if they could have been carved a year ago and not 150. A heart-shaped stone sat awkwardly tilted, but now rests beneath soil and brush - much like the occupant of the grave. One stone is eerily engraved with the Latin phrase for "Death Conquers All," Mori Vincent Omnes.
Another headstone bears the name of Mary Elizabeth who died Aug. 21, 1874 at the age of only three months and four days. Eight headstones have some kind of markings on them and a half a dozen more are just crumbling stone. Most unsettling is evidence of more graves apparent in the numerous sunken pits on the property, indicative of collapsed coffins. While most of the tombstones have toppled or crumbled with time and weather, the government-issued headstones of two Civil War veterans remain standing and contain valuable information, which answer some questions, but unfold volumes more. While one of the soldiers seems to have lived the simple life of a musician and shoemaker before dying of consumption in 1871, his story is modest when compared to his comrade resting a few feet away.
Born in Ireland, Casper Smith enlisted and became a private in Company H 2nd Regiment Eastern Shore, Maryland Volunteer Infantry. His first brush with near-death occurred July 18, 1864 during a battle at Snickers Ford in Virginia where he was shot in the lower abdomen. Although Smith survived the gunshot, he couldn't escape death for long and gave up the ghost nearly two decades later - the victim of a sinister plan and a vicious crime. The Jan. 13, 1882 edition of The Aegis and Intelligencer, a relative of today's Aegis newspaper, trumpeted the deed in its headline, "Horrible Murder of Havre de Grace Captain." On Christmas Eve 1881, Smith left Havre de Grace aboard the schooner Shelldrake, which carried guano to Baltimore. The ship was expected to arrive back in Havre de Grace on Dec. 28, but on Dec. 31, Richard Moore, a deckhand on the Shelldrake, returned to the city alone, without the schooner or Smith.
When the owner of the ship went to Baltimore to investigate the disappearance of the Shelldrake and its crew, a grisly scene awaited him. The boat was found docked and covered in snow, which indicated it had not moved or been tended to recently. Smith was found dead, face-down with holes in his temple, bloody handkerchiefs stuff in his mouth as a gag and two small kegs of powder - perhaps to blow up the ship and destroy evidence of the gruesome murder. It was determined the death blow came from an iron marlinespike, a pointed hand tool used to separate strands of rope, and was delivered by Moore. Moore, who at the time lived with his mother and three brothers in Havre de Grace, was arrested and convicted of second-degree murder, for which he was sentenced to 18 years in a penitentiary.
Smith, who had previously taken a gunshot to the stomach and lived to tell about it, was dead at the age of 45 at the hands of his own deckhand. Now Smith, along with the other occupants of Cedar Hill, lie forgotten on the wooded slope.
The cemetery is believed to have opened in 1832 and was abandoned only a decade later, but there are stories that, even as late as the turn of the 20th century, the old Cedar Hill Cemetery was still being used as a pauper's plot, a final resting place for the homeless and vagrants who came into town along the railroad tracks and died in the city without any money, family or even a known name. Such people would likely have been buried in unmarked graves. The cemetery disappeared from city maps after 1945 and doesn't show up in any modern city land or tax records. Atop the scenic overlook known in another life as Cedar Hill, but now just a patch of scrub off Elizabeth Street, few ever set foot on the once sacred soil - leaving the dead alone with quite a view to watch out over the living below.
Words by Brian |
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