Who Were They? : Graves Found in the North Carolina Mountains

[Music] so [Music] [Music] now let's pause the treasure hunt and artifact hunting for a little bit and go on a little adventure and it's just as much an adventure for me as it is for you because i've been told to go to that tower and then go into the woods and that there's something in those woods that i want to see and that's all i've been told guys um i don't know really looks like a good yellow jacket nest right there better watch out i've been told uh you know there's something up there but i don't know what that is but the person that told me this i trust so it will be worth the hike i'm sure and i thought it might be fun to see it together so if i can manage to get to the top of this hill without getting wrapped up in a snake or a bee's nest when i get to the top there i'm gonna turn you back on all right well he said go to the top of the hill to the left of that tower so that's what we're going to do man this thing is steep and i'm fat looks like it's cleared a little bit ouch cleared a little bit up here oh i see oh i see what he's saying look look what about this whoa huh wow now why would this thing be all the way up here i mean i'm just at the top of a darn mountain there's not even a road huh i don't see any riding on any of these but i'm going to take a little bit closer look here wait a minute i think i do see something right in here oh that's going to be hard to make out so what do you see right here i obviously see a 4-3 at the far right of the screen i didn't see it before what's really on here well jhb 1843 but my eyes were not seeing this yet it just wasn't accustomed enough to what i was looking at you're going to hear me doing a lot of speculating and it's going to be wrong until the next clip when things start to come together and i get a few things right i don't think there's any there's a good chance this is a slave graveyard look how look how close together these stones are and i guess what we have is head and foot markers over there that's a little grave guys that's about four feet long so head and foot marker let's try to count how many graves there are up here it is very old though very old somebody obviously knows about it either that i mean you can see somebody has cut some trees and it's a possibility it's the power line crews that have spotted it up here and are just doing a good deed and somewhat keeping it cleaned out that one don't even have a marker that i can see hmm that's got something scratched in it too i believe right in that area right in there maybe just a number i don't have anything that i can tell a a p a b a oh you know what i bet you a buck that says abraham or maybe abrams abrams there's the m oh guys sorry i'm gonna zoom in on you here okay a b maybe it's okay a b there's the r i don't know what's going on in there that looks like an eight more than anything be honest with you but there's a m and then there's an s so abrams maybe abrams let's see if there's okay now this this headstone over here looks a little bit different a little newer maybe those scratches look new too though don't know guys all right tell you what i'm gonna do i'm gonna shut it off and really try to take a closer look and maybe we can come up with a date or a clear name in here i'd love to find out what the story is behind this well maybe you guys already figured this out um but i couldn't find any other discernible writing so i came back to the one that we were just looking at some of you may have already pieced it together you remember when i said that that right there let's see if i can trace it look like an eight well that is an eight so what we have is not abrams it's just two initials now it's either a b i'm pretty sure that's a b it's rounded off at the top up there a b there's a one there's an eight there's a four there's a five eighteen forty five that is an old grave for this area so keep in mind i'm in western north carolina the native americans were removed from this area in 1838 there weren't a whole lot of settlers in this area before that at all definitely not enough to have an established cemetery i wouldn't think could be wrong so this is probably one of the earliest cemeteries um in the area by far ab-18 [Music] wow so um it still could be a slave graveyard but you know i don't think so i uh i think with it being that old and that early um that uh yeah this was probably just some early early settlers so somebody has scratched on that but i do see an eight and a zero at the end so that could be a you know somebody scratching out a another date 80 1880 something maybe could be wrong very hard to make any of that out that was about it that was as much as i could discern this one was in good shape but there's just nothing on it this has a deep scratch but i really can't tell anything else there it's hard to tell how many graves i mean there's one it's amazing that the you know the dirt is still mounded on these grapes i would have thought that would have all settled out kind of flat but one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven i think there's one right in here it probably is though 12 13 14 the little one right there 15. 16. this is maybe another there's another at 17 and then over here 18 19. one right there 20 so about 20 something graves and probably more probably more just not seeing the stones wow that is interesting super interesting i don't know that's so far back i don't know that there'd be any sort of records on a cemetery like this um we had so many courthouse fires i'm sure i counted that i don't know if i counted that right there but that looks like another grave to me um probably this is probably lost to history but i'll look anyway not very hopeful i'm gonna turn anything up definitely cool to find and you know what i think this winter we'll come back up here and clean it out you may not know who they are but they existed and they mattered they played their part in history so i can do that much for them you can almost i don't know i sit here and i just imagine them standing here crying their tears and singing their [Music] hymns well guys i gotta tell you one of the things that will keep me awake at night is trying to find answers to history that feels like it's been lost and i knew that this cemetery was going to keep me awake but i really didn't have much hope of ever finding out who was buried there i really didn't expect to actually get those questions answered before i hiked my way back down the mountain through a chance encounter with somebody in the middle of the woods and the power of technology guys i know who a b is check this out well as i was headed back down the mountain i've been walking for a while and i come up on a little clearing a minute ago and about got scared to death there was a german shepherd and a sweet lady holding it thank the lord and uh i explained what i was doing up here in these woods and she asked me if i'd seen the old cemetery so not quite as forgotten as what i was thinking she told me a little bit about it so we're right on with those initials she called it the old bird cemetery so that is a family cemetery on there and she said that it's real old and only a handful of people really even know about it and the reason why it's cleared out is there's another gentleman in the community that had family ties and uh he was the one that would try his best to keep it cleaned out a little bit but he's gotten to the place where he's not even able to make it back up there and so i told her that i'd come back this winter and kind of keep an eye on it and keep it cleaned out so the bird cemetery just a family cemetery maybe we can do a little research on them maybe there's something written about them we can learn a little bit more try to get all this little story that we can well just as quick as i could get some cell phone reception i was researching and guys we got lucky somebody cared enough about this little cemetery to at least note that it existed there aren't any directions real specific directions directions that'll help you find it necessarily but it's mentioned and somebody also included some information about the family guys this really helps fill in the gaps and now we know some of the people that are buried there so clark byrd he's born in 1800 in burke county north carolina he marries a lady by the name of mary and by 1836 they have moved to macon county somewhere close to where this graveyard is they had 16 children now here's a list of those children and as you look at the names maybe you're already identifying what i identified and a couple of these grave stone markers are now making sense james harvey bird remember jhb with the death date of 1843 well there he is the oldest child and then look at the next oldest child asbury bird a b look at the death date 1845. if you look really closely at these dates you're going to notice something pretty interesting and sad clark and mary lost their oldest two boys at the age of 22 two years apart i don't know why they died or how they lost their lives but guarantee life was not an easy thing living up in these mountains so isolated from so many other people and there's also a third grave that i think we can identify and if you look at the very bottom of the list you see an infant daughter the 16th child born and that's that little grave all the way out there on the outside edge of the cemetery so there we are that's a little bit about the bird family and they were truly um some of the very first settlers in this area now this this i'm in macon county north carolina and this is towards the western edge of that county the most mountainous portion of the county now 1836 is when clark purchased the land in the area and i told you the native americans removed in 1838 so a little bit of backstory on that turns out that by like 1820 settlers were they weren't settling in the area but they were scoping out the land they knew that the native americans were going to be removed so they were coming in and trying to find identified choice pieces of land so that they could purchase it once it came open for sale most of these earliest settlers settled in the valley areas where farming was easy and then later on by the mid 1830s the mountainous regions were being looked at and so clark would have fit right into that group i would love to have known where the old bird home place is that would be interesting and maybe that's something we'll run across one day but for now i'm glad i found the cemetery and glad i'm able to make this little video and help preserve in some way just a little bit of that history that came really really close to being lost forever and something you need to think about if you're a youtuber metal detectorist or even have a facebook account you run across some things like this ask questions do your best to try to find answers because you may be the only person that really cares about that history right now but down the road it may be very helpful to somebody else alright guys i hope you enjoyed this adventure hope to learn hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about western north carolina history and the bird family we'll see you real [Music] soon [Music] now [Music] you

Channel: History Hound Detecting

Views: 45,063

Keywords: Appalachia, History, Cemetery, Bird Family Cemetery, Bird Cemetery, Settlers, Native American, Cherokee, Macon County, Macon County NC, Clark Bird, Burke County NC, Appalachian history, Graves, Graveyard, Genealogy

Id: 1sw2X0g7eyY

Length: 22min 51sec (1371 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020