I knew I wasn't too far from a beautiful spot on the Big Darby Creek where my brother likes to stop when he's in town. But it isn't a park or preserve with a trail. Just some pull off from the road. Private property for all I know. I considered Prairie Oaks Metro Park but imagined it would be rather crowded on a Saturday afternoon when OSU football has a bye, chilly though it was today. And though I don't mind sharing the woods, I prefer the quiet if possible. So I hit up Google for other nearby options, and saw, just a few miles away, Smith Cemetery State Nature Preserve. Sounded promising so I headed out.
Driving country roads, even in the flattest of flat farmlands, makes me happy. The trappings of modern life are still there, of course, but the land is the land and in large measure the barns and houses and fences and silos could have been standing there a century or two for all one can tell. So no matter where I was going to arrive, I was enjoying the few miles to get there. But as Google Maps was telling me I was on approach, around me all I saw were plowed fields. Nothing resembling any "nature preserve" I'd ever been to. But there was the sign, telling me to park on the road and walk in. And so I pulled off on the shoulder and looked to my right, and this is what I saw:
Uhm ... nature preserve? I was underwhelmed. But also intrigued. So I ambled on over. And wandered into perhaps the most unique place I've ever randomly discovered. There were criss-crossing narrow paths cut through a sea of grass up to my waist or higher, and scattered throughout were numerous headstones. Almost all from the mid- to late-1800s. An exquisitely perfect discovery on the Feast of All Souls. But why did this preserve exist? I soon discovered a few educational markers along the paths, placed by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. It turns out, this part of the continent once had a prairie. Has a prairie? The ODNR website says ...
The Darby Plains supported a vast tallgrass prairie interrupted only by numerous scattered groves of oaks and hickories, especially groves of bur oaks. The dense prairie grass often grew to heights of 6-8 feet. The whole area was described as a sea of prairie grasses and colorful prairie wildflowers. Ohio's native prairies are an outlier of the extensive tallgrass prairies of the west. The pioneers called these grasslands the "barrens." Much of the year they were too wet to plow. Mosquitoes thrived within the dense, wet prairie grasses and were often intolerable. Yet, by late summer the soil would bake dry and crack. Consequently, these were among the last lands in this part of Ohio to be settled. However, between 1810 and 1820 the barrens were finally settled, mostly by families from New England. Eventually, through ditching and tiling, the Darby Plains were converted from inhospitable, wet prairie to some of the most valuable agricultural land in the state. In less than 150 years, the tallgrass prairie was almost obliterated. Today, only scattered bur oak trees and groves and infrequent patches of prairie plants are all that remain of the original vast prairie. Still, as if by design, the best remnants of the Darby Plains survive here at Smith and in nearby Bigelow Cemetery. In pioneer cemeteries, the original prairie sod supports relics of original prairie flora and serves as the final resting place for many of the first settlers whose lives were so interwoven with the prairie wilderness of the Darby Plains. (https://naturepreserves.ohiodnr.gov/smithcemetery)
Evidently, the flowers are brilliant in the spring and summer. But being there today, as autumn has taken full hold and winter is threatening, I would never have imagined the cemetery could be awash in vibrant colors. I could more readily imagine the harsh existence of one of the pioneers buried beneath my feet. The wind was relentless and biting at 45° and sunshine. How much more cruel it must have been in the dead of January.
But what I mostly pondered was my reaction to the cemetery itself. The gravestones are mostly very well preserved, and so it makes it all the more jarring that instead of the tidy well-kept rows of plots they undoubtedly were in the beginning, they now look more like boulders strewn across a field. The prairie grasses that those buried here had been the first to subdue have been given free rein to regain their former dominance, and now those settlers lie beneath the flora that their backbreaking labor had dug through to find the bountiful soil they coaxed into farmland that to this day surrounds this tiny raft of reclaimed biome. It was disconcertingly glorious. Or gloriously disconcerting. Either way, the dialectical in action.
Naturally, after reading that there was another similar prairie cemetery nearby, I had to investigate it as well. Just a little farther west, and this time directly adjacent to the road, but still with nowhere to park except a narrow shoulder.
I suppose it might be because of the proximity of the road and farmhouse just across from it that this second cemetery had a different feeling for me. Or maybe it was the stately sign at its entrance that Smith Cemetery lacked. (Later, as I drove back through Plain City, I noticed a Bigelow St. and wondered at the probable connection between the two.)
Also, all while I wandered through the small enclosure, there was a combine in the field behind it busy with the harvest. At the first preserve, though there was a homestead visible in the distance, the sense was of utter isolation. Here, the living and the long ago dead are still side by side. There was, in fact, one gravestone of a man who was alive into the 1980s. A "man of nature" his epitath declared. But otherwise, the Bigelows and Smiths were clearly contemporaries. And I wondered at how much their lives intersected. Just over five and a half miles between them on current roads, which are pretty near what the crow would fly, most of it on the Old Post Road that is now 161, but is what the settlers traveled west from Pennsylvania, if I'm remembering what I read correctly. So over an hour to walk. And not all that much faster on horseback. Were some of those Smith women born Bigelow, and vice versa? How fascinating to contemplate.
I also found myself mulling over the reason some gravestones look nearly unchanged 100+ years after being set, while others weathered far less well. And I marveled at the intricacies of some of the engraving. I wouldn't have expected Madison County in the 1800s to have so many options from which to choose. Did they design their own? One grouping of siblings who died as children had identical stonework. But otherwise I did not notice repetition in the size or shape or embellishments.
And, as it was at the Smith Preserve, here, the prairie grasses are fully re-established. The wildness of the half acre cemetery so sharply contrasts against the perfectly plowed and planted expanse around it. Land that would, but for the sign and barely cleared paths, seem completely abandoned juxtaposed against land that is the anchor of life as we know it (in fact, while at the gift shop I saw a decorative sign with the last sentence of this quote from Daniel Webster, that leapt back to my mind as I reflected on how the farmland could not exist without the millenia of enrichment and protection provided by the prairie grasses, which the farmers had to remove to access that same soil: Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization).
And if I wasn't fully enough engaged in meditating on the earth already, it decided to connect with me directly, perhaps just as a reminder that ultimately it is nature that will win the day, always. In this case the reminder was delivered by me stepping up to my mid-calf in a hole that I presume leads to some large rodent's underground lair.
Had I been moving at any kind of speed, I'd possibly be pondering surgery for a broken bone or torn tendons rather than merely anticipating that the soreness in my knee and hip and neck will be worse tomorrow than the slight twinge that started the moment I got back on my feet. It was not a graceful tumble. I just pulled another little piece of chaff from my hair a few minutes ago.
And so, I had gone looking for a walk in the autumn woods. But instead I stumbled upon two little slices of reclaimed natural history, unknowingly saved for posterity by the interment of the very pioneers who engineered its widespread extinction. The same pioneers who, with their unimaginable grit and tenacity, are in no small measure what made it possible for me to be sitting here typing these words. I hope they are pleased with the prairie grass blanket under which they now have their eternal rest. And I hope that they enjoyed my visit on this All Souls Day. I know that I did.
