DUANE
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Duane's take
The way the marker tells it, here's what I know about Pope Cemetery in Harrison County. Pope Cemetery was established in 1863. That's the whole inscription, friend.
Four words and a year, standing out here in Harrison County. Eighteen sixty-three, right in the thick of some of the hardest years this country ever saw, somebody chose this ground, staked it out, and said: this is where we remember our people. That's not nothing.
That's everything. The marker doesn't give you names, doesn't give you stories, doesn't give you a single soul buried there by name. Just the place, the year, and the fact that somebody thought it mattered enough to mark.
And here we are, still stopping to say it out loud.
What the marker says
POPE CEMETERY ESTABLISHED 1863