How To Find A Lost Graveyard

John Burgett (swinging from a grapevine in the DuVall Cemetery at the right side of the photo) volunteers on Memorial Day to honor our veterans by putting flags on their graves. This year, in addition to our family cemetery in Orlando, he was asked to honor vets in a couple cemeteries that no one looks after.

The DuVall Cemetery, off Oil Creek Road, is "on the road side of the hill." He looked down the side of the hill at acres of fully forested land: no clearing, no gravestones in sight.

Then he noticed a line of trees larger than the rest, maybe old growth, certainly older growth, trees. Now, why had no one harvested those trees when they harvested the rest of this hill? A cemetery!

Once he was down with the large trees, he found a few standing, and many, many broken & buried gravestones. Polly (Godfrey) DuVall, mother of Patience (Duvall) Skinner, was one. Later we found her husband, G.T. DuVall. There were also sundry Waldos and a Simms, who had married one of Patience's sisters. We could only find a very few of the gravestones and they were hard to read.