Within a one and a half mile distance from my home are two cemeteries, which I recently walked to in succession. Call me an anomaly, but I enjoy visiting cemeteries. For a person who loves both spirituality and history, they are ideal outings, plus, they are great places to go when you want to be alone with your thoughts. Chances are high you won’t be running into others…at least not living ones! 

Within these two particular cemeteries are buried numerous people I once knew, including family members, friends, former schoolteachers, and even a few individuals for whom I served as a pallbearer.  Amazingly, within these two locales, I can also visit the graves of no less than five generations of my ancestors.

It had been a while since I had been to either of these burial grounds, and at one, I realized I had forgotten the exact location of the graves of my great, great, great-grandparents, Eli and Elizabeth Farmer. I knew their gravestones were flat in the ground, which made spotting them even more difficult. Once rediscovered, I was saddened to see that the grass around the stones had almost consumed them. It brought to mind the words uttered by the character Martha Corinne Walton (played by Beulah Bondi on the TV show “The Waltons”): “Neglected graves are a shameful thing!” 

So, I spent the next little while pulling earth by hand from not only Eli’s and Elizabeth’s stones, but the similarly hidden adjoining stones of a few other family members. While I was partially motivated by my great interest in genealogy and historical preservation, it was simply the right and honorable thing to do.

No living person has any firsthand memory of Eli Farmer, who passed in 1885, but because I have spent time researching him, it made the unearthing of his stone even more personal. Likely hailing from Lincoln County, North Carolina, his father and grandfather appear to have changed the family’s surname from Bauer to Farmer, “bauer” being the German word for “farmer.” A learned man, Eli represented his congregation at various Lutheran synods in the early days before the Civil War and taught Watauga County’s first mayor, William Lewis Bryan, at the Soda Hill Schoolhouse near Meat Camp. He served as a captain of the Confederate Home Guard at Camp Mast in Watauga County, and in 1882, he announced his candidacy for the North Carolina Legislature as a member of the Republican party.

Hopefully, because of a little grass pulling (and intentional future upkeep), Eli Farmer can be remembered a little while longer.