Paul and others: It is a noted fact that in extreme NE TN, cemeteries were found in two basic places: beside churches and on family farms. Some of these locations are so extreme in this region (the Va/TN/NC triangle) that many families buried their dead on the very tops of the mountains. The purpose - obvious - you needed every inch of farm land in the mountains and couldn't spare any flat land for cemeteries. My husband has one family cemetery which lies just below the top of a mountain near the NC/TC state line. A wagon trail can be seen to this day indicating that some sort of flat bed wagon was used to bring the deceased as far as the cemetery. At that point, they must have had some sort of rig to let the coffins down the mountainside. It is far to steep to carry such a box down the hillside. Without doubt, most of or earliest ancestors in the VA Southside were placed in out-of-the-way locations on the plantations and farms, and few were fortunate enough to be marked by any sort of identifying stone. Everytime we step on these lands, we either walk on our ancestors or Native American sites which now remain in that part of the country. My husband's paternal grandmother was the member of the community to be called upon to prepare the deceased for burial. She washed, dressed and prepared the bodies, and lined the interior of the crude coffins. She was also a midwife (they sort-of went hand-in-hand). Does anyone have any information on the preparation of the dead for burial in Southside? A late cousin of mine owned a drop leaf table which was used for the preparation of the deceased. This would have been in Eastern Carolina. I have always wondered if the practices varied in the more established areas and the "frontier."

To Betty & All: When my father was a teenage boy, he and his older brother, George, and two more young men had to go over in a remote hollow and put an old man into a coffin and carry it out.. as they came along the top of a narrow ridge the coffin began to swing because the rope attaching it to the pole they had on their shoulders had stretched....George didn't have any shoestrings in his "brogan" shoes and as the coffin became more difficult to control, he fell down and slid down the steep hill....and lost his shoe in the leaves.. they never did find it and he had to carry that coffin about a mile on that bare foot...walking on sharp rocks, pine cones and such.. This became the basis for one of my most popular stories, "The Coffin On The Rail".. Takes twenty minutes to tell it.. Yes, people in the mountains of Va., TN and NC lived and died in rough, remote places and were buried on tops of high hills and mountains.. Much of the flat land was subject to flooding by the creeks and rivers.. There's nothing worse than seeing a coffin floating down a swollen stream! You are right, why waste good farm land to bury the dead when a poor hilltop would serve the purpose just as well!......And, it also put them a little closer to Heaven! G. Lee Hearl Authentic Appalachian Storyteller Abingdon, Va.