(This post is a response to the latest biweekly topic at Ecotone, a wiki devoted to writing about place.)

Right in the middle of nowhere, Ohio, sits one of my favorite places. It’s only a half acre, and you’d probably miss it if you were speeding down the flat, straight road that takes you past it. It’s in the middle of nowhere, you see, surrounded by the soybean fields and cattle pastures that are typical of the Ohio heartland. But if you stop to stroll, you’ll find yourself taken back in human and natural history.

Bigelow Cemetery sits a full foot higher than the flatlands that surround it. Years of farming have eroded the rich dark soil of central Ohio, America’s breadbasket, but Bigelow Cemetery has never been plowed. Instead, God’s own half-acre carries nestled within it several dozen graves of pioneer families fringed by the prairie wildflowers that were wiped out by those same families’ attempts to eke out a living in the Darby Plains. The home of royal catchfly and other threatened plants, today Bigelow Cemetery is protected as a nature preserve.

Early pioneers referred to this land as the barrens. They couldn’t imagine that soil that didn’t support trees could have any worth, nor could they pierce the prairie sod with their wooden plows. Located in the “V” between two rivers, the Darby Plains flooded every spring then dried to a crisp every summer. Families who settled near Bigelow Cemetery and its down-the-road neighbor Smith Cemetery had to face floods and mosquito-borne illness in the spring and fires and cracked farm fields in the summer.

The stones in Bigelow Cemetery reflect how tough the times could be. Women regularly died in childbirth; grieving husbands quickly took new wives to care for large families. Children died of infectious disease or plain and simple “sickliness”; entire families were wiped out by “milk fever,” the result of drinking milk from cattle who had eaten toxic white snakeroot. (Had pioneers known the true culprit, they would have kept their cattle out of the shady lowlands where snakeroot grows.)

I remember the mute story told by one particular cluster of gravestones. At first glance, the only unusual thing about this pioneer family is its small size: a man and wife, both living to old age, and their two children, a daughter and a son. Closer investigation of the birth and death dates on these stones, however, reveals a family tragedy only thinly veiled by prim euphemism. The unmarried daughter died at age 15; her “brother” died as an infant several days later.

I can only imagine the grief this man and wife, having finally borne a daughter in the prime of life, must have felt when they discovered her “secret.” In addition to the stigma of unwed motherhood, their own & their neighbors’ hard-won experience had taught them that childbirth was risky and raising a family difficult. And in the course of several days, this man and wife were bereft of their only child and grandson, destined to fade from memory but for the testimony of their gravestones.

But Bigelow Cemetery isn’t a sad place. Many of its stones bear the testimony of solid Christian faith: fingers pointing upward to where the dead wished to go, favorite Bible verses etched in stone. One inhabitant of these plains was a doctor and a poet, and he wrote the verses that grace the stones of several of these graves, including his own. I still remember the Memento Mori of one of his compositions:

My glass has run, my grave you see.
In time prepare to follow me.
Go home, dear friends, and dry your tears.
I must lie here ’til Christ appears.
And when he does, I hope to rise.
Unto a life that never dies.

I haven’t been to Bigelow Cemetery for years. I gave interpretive walks there as a high school volunteer naturalist, but I stopped when I went to college then moved to New England. But my heart still finds room for the tall grass and bright flowers that shelter those weathered gravestones; when I close my eyes, I am transported to a time when the Darby Plains stretched infinitely in all directions and a dark hole in the ground only pointed to an even larger infinite stretching beyond the sky.