Tombstone Tuesday: Mass Stone in Abandoned Ghost Town Graveyard

This cemetery can be found at Besser Bell Natural Area in Presque Isle, Michigan where I grew up. The very small cemetery, enclosed by an unfinished wood fence built by restorers, had been abandoned after the tiny village died out after the logging bust. Since all of the original wooden markers have long been lost, this stone serves to name all of the known burials in the cemetery. It's very sad to me how little is known about those buried here. You walk through and don't know where the bodies are, the only tangible objects are one surviving gravestone and a small "crib" fence around a baby's grave. I hope to find out more about these hearty settlers, who they are, when they were born and died...facts about their lives that could give them separate identities instead of a bunch of names clustered all together on the same stone.