A tumbled-down 19th century stone wall in Rappahannock County is spinning quite a yarn. And what it's saying connects current history with the long-ago past.

At Poe's Run Farm in Flint Hill near the confluence of the Jordan and Rappahannock rivers, a cemetery restoration expert is working diligently to unearth the story of one family's history. His hope is that by reconstructing the graveyard, rebuilding broken headstones and refurbishing the fallen stone wall, another piece of the region's patchwork history will fall into place.

"We're connected to our past," said Eugene Hough of Heritage Guild Works as he took a break from probing around fallen gravestones in the old Poe cemetery. "By looking at who is buried here, when they lived, when they died, we can reconstruct how they lived. We've got to retain that connection to the past. It is relevant to our future."

Pennsylvania native Hough was hired by farm owner Julia Thieriot to restore the long-abandoned graveyard. He spent last week working on the project, his first in Virginia, and taking a look at several other sites offered him by neighbors who saw what he was doing and became interested in the renovation. The pristine spot overlooks a wide river meadow that a local archaeologist says was probably a Native American hunting ground long before the Poe family set up a farm there in the early 1800s.

Looking at the site, you can see how it fell fallow. Maintenance of the hand-stacked, dry-laid decorative stone wall surrounding the graveyard was long-ago abandoned in favor of less expensive and less labor-intensive barbed wire.

The wire more effectively kept stock out of the cemetery, but also made keeping the place up harder for the farm owners. A walnut tree took root at the north end of the graveyard — about 50 years ago by the look of it. An ash and poplar soon followed at the south end.

Roots entwined, pushing over headstones, erasing evidence of footstones and burying any artifacts left there. The stone wall finally gave in altogether, becoming just a heap of rubble as modern machinery — namely, tractors with powerful mower decks — replaced a horse-drawn sickle bar long used to tend the site.

The cemetery was nearly erased.

One piece of evidence remained, though, a sign that the site was once a beloved spot: vinca vine — also called periwinkle — persists to this day, and that's what Thieriot noticed when she combed her new farm a few years ago.

She saw the evergreen vine growing around a heap of rocks in the middle of her paddock, but did not recognize its relevance.

The tough ornamental flowering groundcover is not native to the area, so it had to have been planted there. Vinca is often planted in graveyards; it is hardy and spreads easily. With little care required, the vine is an easy way to beautify a place.

So even though the gravestones were covered by invasive wild rose and hidden by autumn olive bushes, even though the fallen stone wall looked for all purposes like a rock heap, the vinca spoke volumes: here was a sacred place.

Hough was excited by the challenge. "It is our job to preserve history, to discover our past to protect our future," he said.

Nearly too late

Hough met Thieriot in February in Aiken, S.C., where both spend time in the winter, escaping the mid-Atlantic region's notoriously cold and damp weather.

"I met Gene at a party," Thieriot said, "and the cemetery connection came up quickly. I'm thrilled that he's here, and I'm really excited about the work he's doing."

Thieriot invited Hough to come to Poe's Run, a farm she bought just a couple years ago, and see what he could make of the weedy old graveyard.

Hough first cleared away decades of brush and thick weeds from the site, uncovering the rubble of a stone wall that formerly encircled the cemetery.

Next, he gently reset what gravestones he could identify, putting aside fractured bits of others. Then, he marked out a grid pattern using white tape on the ground to delineate what he felt was likely the original layout of the burial ground.

"They would have kept it up," he said of the early residents' care of their family cemetery.

Poe descendant Melvin Poe, 87, stopped in when he heard about the project, saying he remembered many stories about the old Poe place in Rappahannock. He grew up just a few miles away on the Fauquier side of the Rappahannock River.

"I know they kept it up," Poe said of the graveyard, "but, you know, people move away, things get sold. It was just forgot."

Hough enlisted students at a local riding camp to help with the next stage of restoration. He gave each a short digging tool and told them to gently scratch away earth from the gravestones — a couple of dozen were visible — and carefully place any items they unearthed in a plastic bag beside it.

Two of the girls uncovered broken pieces of a headstone; they placed the stone bits together on the ground.

"I think it says 'Clyde Poe'," Alyssa Thompson, 15, said as she tried to fit the broken edges of stone. "But I'm not sure. maybe 'Claude'."

Other undamaged stones in the graveyard are marked in carved cursive script. "Elizabeth Poe," one reads. "Died 1855. Aged 1."

Hough noted that many of the gravestones — the visible ones span from 1846 to 1860 — have identical script. "I think probably an artisan came through here and did them all at the same time," he said. "Not when the people died, but later, all at once. The family would have brought him down here and pointed to a flat stone marker and said, 'Ok. This was Aunt Mabel, and this one here was little Charlie.' Then he would have made the stones you see here today."

It is only after years of neglect, as properties change hands and relatives move away or die, Hough said, that cemeteries of "a certain age" become unkempt.

"It is our legacy" to restore them, he said. "We have to protect history."

In particular, he said, he likes to involve kids in the project. "It lets you 'live' the history a little bit."

As well, passers-by often drop in and check out the work he does. "Everywhere I go to do projects like this, people stop in and see what's going on," Hough said. "And every time, someone will give me a nugget of information that helps tie the thing together. Like Melvin Poe here. He's adding parts to this story that we wouldn't have known otherwise."

Neighbor Frank Chapin stopped in to see what was going on at Poe's Run. After he heard of the relevance of vinca, he invited Hough to take a look at an outcrop of the vine on his Grunkle Farm just up the road. "That's my next project," Hough said with a grin. "I think it's an even earlier cemetery," one that was even closer to disappearing.

Historically speaking

Revolutionary and Civil War history abounds in Virginia and pre-colonial history, too, is documented. Still, Rappahannock-based archaeologist Dr. Pat Curry said there is much to be learned from any historic renovation, of any age site.

"We can discover so much," Curry said sifting through a pile of sandy soil Hough had piled alongside one of the gravestones. She looked south, towards the open river bottom. "I think this would have been a very likely hunting ground for Native Americans, just as it was a nice site for a home in Colonial days."

Curry said she hopes to find more about the area's even earlier history through Hough's work. She said another neighbor, adjacent to the Poe's Run site, found stone tools and spear points dated thousands of years old by Smithsonian scientists. "It's very exciting," she said of the "living history."

The Rappahannock Historical Society is interested in Hough's work.

"Any new information found by Mr. Hough would be of interest to us to embellish our files," said Judy Tole of the historical society.

Tole said the society provided Thieriot with information on the Poe/Corley cemetery when she first bought the property. She said the cemetery was visited before 1989.

"Only four tombstones could be read at the time since it was so overgrown and many stones were barely visible and were mostly hand- carved fieldstones that could not be completely read," she said.

The historical society has had a cemetery project for many years headed by Misty Hitt Wright. Over 500 cemeteries have been identified in the county with over 11 residents in those cemeteries.

"Anyone interested in information on any cemeteries in the county are welcome to visit the RHS and peruse our files, many with pictures," said Tole.

The hope is that the historic graveyard and possible earlier burial grounds might gain recognition by the National Register of Historic Places or other groups that can protect the area from future development.

Poe's Run is in conservation easement, but a nearby threat looms: The Dominion Power line runs nearly within sight of the cemetery. The proposed increase in its breadth and height will affect the viewshed of the area, and any earthworks could erase evidence of prior residents, Curry said.

Those interested in helping the ongoing restoration projects, or anyone who thinks they might know of other forgotten burial sites are invited to call Hough at (610) 247-1791.