Indiana Spirit Quest #113: County Line Traditional Cache

Pioneer Cemetery (All photos by THE SHADOW)

The Indiana Spirit Quest series of geocaches will take you to a number of historic cemeteries built by Hoosier Pioneers. In less than a year, the quest has grown to over a hundred caches hidden in eleven north Indiana counties, and the hiders have grown to four cacher teams, each comprised of A Man and His Dog... PRAIRIEPARTNERS has set a record for one-day ISQ finds on 10-16-2004 at 55! 112 cacher teams have logged over 1,600 finds.

The Shadow has selected County Line Cemetery, Salem Township, Steuben County, for this caching extravaganza. Even tho he has clouded your minds so that you cannot see him ( Unless you are Jedis), Listen carefully to what THE SHADOW has to say about this place:

Welcome to County Line Cemetery. It is obviously a very old, inactive cemetery, surprisingly large in size. Most markers are unable to be read due to normal erosion. There appears to be many, many, veterans here, judging by the number of bronze flagholders by the markers. I only found one government style marker, that of a Civil War veteran. None I saw had any verifying inscriptions. I thought this sort of odd.

When dry, off road parking is available. Since the cemetery is located on a busy state highway, cachers needs to be careful of the traffic.--THE SHADOW

The often seen "pile of stones"...

There are many more veterans buried in these old cemeteries than is indicated by a reading of the tombstones or even the presence of a service flag-holder. Generally a commercial tombstone only carries names, dates, ages, relationships, poems... and only occasionally a record of service. By contrast, the older Government provided stones usually give only name ,state, unit and sometimes rank (no dates).It is rare to see both stones together, but it does happen. As for the newer bronze government plaques, they can be obtained for any veteran, back to the Revolution. They usually carry name, rank, unit, state,theatre,sometimes dates, and decorations awarded (Especially Purple Heart). The modern trend is to have the government bronze plaque attached to the back of the commercial granite tombstone, but they frequently also serve as the primary (only) marker just like the old stone ones did...Aand also, many veterans are buried in national cemeteries, and battlefield cemeteries, as in the case of Civil War Casualties and Overseas Casualties...

The cache container originally was a small camo'd match holder, but is now a small loc n loc container. BYOP. Park with care. If you find a fallen US flag, please stick it back in the ground. As always, please be respectful, and cache in, trash out. Cache on.

Cache In - Trash Out!

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