CACHE: ***Cords off by a bit because I had to move it and forgot to pull new cords. With construction on M-24, there's lots of traffic during peak work travel hours. Park and grab. May not be winter friendly, yet is night friendly. Hint is a spoiler.
CEMETERY: Is located in the woods next to the cache, with most of the burials near the back (western end). There are a lot of deep critter holes in this cemetery, as well as random piles of rock. Use caution if you choose to visit, not recommended for smaller children as cemetery is overgrown. During hunting season there's a deer blind here.
HISTORY: HADLEY TWP. — Peppered throughout the county are spots which, at one point or another, were a community of sorts, before becoming ghost towns or all but disappearing. One such spot is Rural Vale, which exists now only as an overgrown cemetery on Baldwin Road just north of Brauer Road.
These are the kinds of spots that capture the interest of history lovers in the county, and make them want to learn more. Over the weekend, a handful of them visited the Rural Vale Cemetery and uncovered a piece of history, just for fun, and also in hopes of keeping the memory of people who came before us alive.
Holly Smith and Hillary and Dawson Saunders, all Lapeer residents, went on an excursion to the old cemetery to explore and take photos. Holly and Hillary, both 41, frequently go on adventures around the county, visiting historical sites and documenting what is left there from days gone by, and Dawson, 15, had expressed an interest in coming along.
He was rewarded on Saturday, when the trio found the footer of a headstone and probed the ground nearby to see if they could find the rest. They did find a completely buried base and headstone, which they carefully unearthed.
“Finding the stone was really neat,” said Hillary. “It means they can be remembered. We had found another one in that same cemetery last year.”
According to Smith’s research, Rural Vale was a community during the Civil War, and had a cooper shop, the Whitney blacksmith shop, a wagon shop run by a Mr. Cady and a pottery business run by Henry Price. The first known burial in the cemetery was in July 1854 and the last in October 1866. There are 10 known burials, and of those, six headstones remain. The other four are still missing.
“I found (the cemetery) on an old plat map nearly 20 years ago and visited it for the first time with my dad around 18 years ago,” Smith said. “We asked the township for records and they said other than having ownership of the cemetery, they didn’t have any. This is the case with many old cemeteries, especially if they stopped being used by the 1900s. Old records often were kept at a church or schoolhouse if they are pretty close.”
The lack of information makes the quest to solve the mysteries even more enticing for Smith.
The stone they unearthed this past weekend read “Wife of MF Price, died 27 October 1866, age 26y 10d.” Smith found that he was Mortimer Price, son of Henry and Permelia Price, who also settled in Hadley. Mortimer married Clarissa E. (Woolston) Price in Flint on March 2, 1857. She was from Shiawassee County, and the couple had four known children, three of whom are buried in Rural Vale, but their stones are missing.
Smith said she loves to “put flesh back on the bones,” by finding lost headstones, making sure there is an accurate reading, taking photographs — using umbrellas, lights and different camera angles in her attempts to read the inscriptions — mapping the cemeteries and finding out what she can about the person’s life.
She doesn’t however, clean or upright the headstones, because she doesn’t want to cause further damage. She is merely trying to document them so they are not lost forever.
“When I do find a stone, whether it be a lost stone or one that escaped documentation, I’m happy,” Smith said. “I feel like I’m helping them to be remembered. It’s human nature to not want to be forgotten. Every grave represents a person that was important to another, no matter how long they lived, at one time or another. My goal is to do my part in my lifetime to honor their memory, even if the memories are not my own. To some, it’s a name on a rock, to me, they are people.”
KNOWN BURIALS: Harriet Z. Baldwin, Adaniram J. and Mary P. Dawson, Clarissa E., Clarissa V., Libby A. and Lincoln B. Price, and ALphonzo Wright. The other two known graves are just initials on a footstone. In the 1800's it was common to have a headstone with the person's memorial on it, and a footstone/footer marking, well, the foot of their grave.
Congrats to y2kcompliant and rootee2t for [FTF] and *S&M* for [STF]