“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
James Joyce, The Dead
After posting several times in recent months on the plight of Nat Fuller’s final resting place, the neglected Heriot St. Cemetery and my ongoing efforts to host a cleanup, I’m now finding a raised awareness of burial sites in and around the Lowcountry.
Here on James Island, I drive down Secessionville Rd. to go to work every day, past rows of homes interspersed with overgrown thickets of verdant, sub – tropical growth. Recently, I noticed some work being done in one of those thickets on a raised embankment overlooking the homes around it.
After several days of ongoing work, I saw that several headstones were revealed, and that this was in fact a burial site. Always busy and in a rush to get in to the kitchen, I just wondered every day until I made it a point to leave 10 minutes early last week to afford a glimpse.
I parked on the side of the road, crossed and walked up the embankment. You’ll see from the slideshow that there’s no sign, no fence or anything like that. Just the assorted markers from the late 19th and early to mid 20th Century.
More than one member of the Drayton family is here. Other than that I really have no idea. Just as at Heriot St, it prompted questions: who were these folks, why are they here, and what caused the neglect of the cemetery? And who is doing the cleanup of the site? Could they be partners of a similiar effort on Heriot St?