Ah, the Jersey shore in summer! I had my family at Long
Beach Island for five days in mid-June and the weather was glorious. Beach,
sun, pool, everything was perfect (except for the ticket I got for not wearing
my seat belt) – the only thing missing was a trip to a graveyard!
I’m sure I’m one of a select few people who think of such
things while on vacation. To make it easier on my wife and four-year-old
daughter, I usually head out early before they wake up. So I planned a sunrise
trip up the island and over to the mainland to hit the Staffordville Cemetery
near Tuckerton (across the bay from LBI).
I’ve photographed a few cemeteries in this area but had
never been to Staffordville Cemetery. Other than its simple existence on a map,
I could find nothing about it on the Internet. So I made the trip on a Monday
morning, shortly after sunrise. Sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean can be
breathtaking, but of course, I missed it. Got to the beach at 6 a.m. and
sunrise must have been 5:30. So I jumped into my wife’s Toyota RAV4 and headed
north up the island. Cops all over the place here trying to nab speeders and
folks not wearing seatbelts, so I really had to crawl the five miles or so to
the causeway to Manahawkin.
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| Manahawkin, New Jersey coastline at dawn |
The ride was peaceful, not many people about yet. After crossing
onto the mainland, Manahawkin, New Jersey is the first major town you get to.
If you head north or south on Route 9, there is a cemetery within a half mile either
way of the intersection. I’ve been to both in the past, and they are worth the
visit: Manahawkin Baptist Cemetery (north) and Greenwood Cemetery (south).
Since I was driving past Greenwood, I figured I might stop there on the way
back if I had time. Staffordville was about two miles south of here.
I was on the lookout for “Cemetery Road,” as the
Staffordville Cemetery appeared (on the map) to be off Route 9 down this road a few blocks. Found the street
sign with no problem, though it was almost hidden by all the other signs around
it. I drove down the quiet road alongside a trailer park and saw the cemetery
at the end. Very unassuming little place. As my grandmother might have said,
“it was a small, sad little graveyard.”
This is the pine barrens, as they call it – pine trees and
sand. A cemetery sign made out of timber, no gate or fence. One large marble
monument to Rev. Samuel Parker’s wife, the rest regular smaller stones. A
fenced-in family plot, veterans markers, flags, weather-worn lawn and garden statues, a penny
on a headstone. Someone had placed a few stone fragments together in the sand to
spell out the words “FATHER HE.”
The graveyard was only about 150 feet deep and 200
feet wide, clean, no trash, no graffiti. Some old Christmas decorations here and there. Old grave markers from the mid-1800s
to a few newish ones, including a Vietnam Vet who died in 2006. Some old sea shells adorned a few of the graves.
Weird, yellowish-green plant life covered most of the sand.
I began to wonder how many thousands of these small
graveyards must exist, and how many thousands of people drive past them without
a second thought. These graveyards house tiny memorials to hundreds of
thousands of individual lives that have passed. The lives spent in
Staffordville, perhaps, may have been spent fishing, farming, sailing – even being
a reverend’s wife in the 1850’s. What must that have been like, I wonder, being
a reverend’s wife back then?
On my way back to LBI, I did spend some time in Greenwood, a
larger and fancier burial ground. The traffic picked up a bit of volume by
then, mostly mainlanders going to work Monday morning in Manahawkin or to LBI
to work the tourist trade. I would be following them soon, headed back to life
after spending a bit of time here with death. These regular drivers probably all
know where Greenwood is because of its large wrought iron sign. By the same
token, most of them are probably unaware of the existence of the smaller, Staffordville
Cemetery. Out of sight, out of mind. Which is why it seems so important to me
to hunt down these small, hidden cemeteries. They exist, after all, to honor
- and help us remember - the dead.
