Sepulture Part Two

Last week I was up at the land sitting by the little fire I had built to stay warm. It was a chilly day, and it was the day LC and JC were putting in the septic system (Sepulture Part One). The cell phone rang and it was RG, my old college roommate buddy calling. Her husband, JK, who is a professor of Appalachian studies at Warren Wilson, wanted to take a group of students on a spontaneous trip to Shelton Laurel to the site of the Shelton Laurel Massacre. She wondered if I knew who owned the land that the graves are on. I didn't, but I figured LC and JC probably did. Sure enough, they did. Turns out, their family owns the land that some of the graves are on. Of course. And they knew about the land that the other graves are on. I put the phone on speaker, and we had a couple of really funny 4 way conversations. It was funny because the dialect out here is strong in person, and really strong over the phone. Between the phone connection, the speaker aspect and the dialect differences, it made for a funny conversation. Finally, RG got some directions she was comfortable with and a name to pass on to JK, who called me later in the day and invited me to meet up with him and his group at the massacre site.

The Shelton Laurel Massacre, in a nutshell, was a real shitty thing that happened back in 1863. Confederates hunted down, lined up and executed 13 men and boys from Shelton Laurel because they had avoided joining the Confederate cause and for that reason were accused of being Union sympathizers. And on top of that, they had stolen salt from some Confederates in Marshall (probably because they couldn't get any and they really needed it to put food by for the winter.) They were killed out in the cold, and their bodies were left out on the ground. A day or two later, a lady from the community- I can't think of how she was related- came with a sled and they piled the bodies on the sled and took them up and buried them.

So I met with JK and the class and had an interesting experience with the people who own the house on the site where the massacre occurred. The woman of the house showed Warren Wilson students this device she has that supposedly reads your body's energy field, while her son stood in the hallway with JK and I telling us ghost stories about the house. He said as a child, a man in a grey uniform walked in with a rifle, aimed at the boy's head and pulled the trigger. He realized it was ghost a few minutes later. Creepy.










Just before dusk we drove down the road a mile or two to the site of the graves of the massacred. First we were told "no tresspassing" by a lady who lives on one side of the grave site, so we travelled around to the backside of the hill and climbed up into the woods that way to visit the graves, which are unmarked stones laying alongside some old Shelton family graves. It was a beautiful dusk, and an interesting journey.

Shelton Laurel way is a beautiful and remote place, and it is fascinating to think of people way back then living back in the mountains like that.