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Adjacent to my dad’s farm (in Bama), there was a 40-acre site where in the middle...was the graves of the husband and wife who came there and settled in the mid-1800’s. The graves sat there for all those years. Sometime in the 1980s, the property got sold to some local farmer, who quietly went out there one night and removed the gravestones. The next spring....he plowed the entire field...including the 6 foot by 6 foot section where the couple was buried. No one noticed this much...the grave was a good 400 off the paved road, and you had to stretch to see the stone anyway. It was a year or two later before anyone noticed this and mentioned this to the farmer. He didn’t care, and most folks just looked the other way. My dad didn’t have much positive to say about the guy...but admitted later that at least a hundred graves in the local area were like that in the 1950s, and almost all of them have had the stones removed in the past forty years.

In my early teens I was looking through some family records in our basement when I came across a deed to an old family cemetery. It was in another part of the state where my father's family had lived for generations as farmers before many of them moved to the city.

The deed provided for a right of way across the surrounding farmland. We eventually made a trip down there, not sure if the cemetery would be there anymore. We spent some time looking around for but finally there it was, entirely surrounded by a plowed field.

The cemetery was not large and was surrounded by an iron fence. It looked like no one had tended it for many decades. Tall cedar tress, a species I have never liked, had grown in the plot and their roots had upset many of the stones.

It must have been a pain for the farmer to plow around this small piece of land. Next time I go there I won't be surprised if everything has disappeared., although I expect there are still some distant relatives living in the area.

I suppose if he’d bought the property, quietly just taken down the fence, built over it and gone on, no one would have noticed. You think?

One thing I did find odd was that people think it’s ok to move graves for roads, but not for houses. Why are public roads ok but homes are not?!

I personally know of two similar situations in Georgia.
Two old cemeteries that while no one was looking had the stones removed and the graveyard was just plowed up into the rest of the surrounding corn field.

“....but admitted later that at least a hundred graves in the local area were like that in the 1950s, and almost all of them have had the stones removed in the past forty years.”

.....that’s what happened in our family’s farming community in the late 30s, 40s, 50s...the new owner would throw the stones down the outhouse shaft and plow straight over the graves....this was the era when everybody was switching over to tractors and bigger equipment....the small family graveyards were a nuisance....they were a throwback to the age when your people buried you right “on the place” and had to get you in the ground quick...

.....the guy in this story needs to move on....even if he bought the property and built elsewhere.....cemetaries are messy...plastic flowers blow all over the place...people leave potted plants on the grave which die; then they fling the pots into the nearest bushes....kids slip in at night to party....I know...I’ve served on a cemetery board before.