There's a nice historical site that stores pictures from the last 2 centuries for my town, and it devotes a few pages to a small church that's about 2 miles down the road from me, near the main shopping center. It's called the Old Stone Church now, but used to house the congregation of Crossroads Presbyterian in the old days. That congregation moved to a different site a few miles away.

This church has the oldest cemetery in town, started on a family's land because an unknown child showed up and died there. The man who owned the farm, Robert Johnston, took the boy's body -- at least I think it was a boy -- and buried him like family, next to his sister-in-law's grave. No one ever seems to have found out who the boy was, and the marker evidently said "child" or "boy" or something general.

Those two gravestones are still there but indeciperable now. The family in later years offered this area as burial space for the neighboring farmers, and a few years later a church was built there.

Here's how it looked last month:

There was a time capsule buried next to the flag, but I believe they dug it up about a year ago.

And here it was around 50 years ago, perhaps, and services were being held there:


And before that, in 1920:


And even before that. This looked at first like a drawing but it is not; it's the remains of a photo. It is obviously not the same building. The original, simple church building was replaced in 1896. So this must be right before that.


And here are a few gravestones. I haven't found the two original ones yet, but they're in there somewhere.





Quite a few have been replaced with new markers showing the information that could be decipered, like "__ Taylor Died/December 4, 183_" and such. That one, in fact, was a 6-year-old child, but his or her first name has been lost over the years, along with the year he or she died.