DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, far as Duane can reckon. Out here in Franklin County, there's a patch of ground called Rockhill Cemetery, and it holds more history than most people slow down long enough to see. The farming community of Rockhill took root after the Civil War — those years of 1861 to 1865 — when folks came looking for a quieter life and found it in the soil.
They built a community. They built churches. They built a school.
And, like all communities do, they built a burial ground. This one. The earliest known burial here is Mary Hitchens, who died around 1875 at the age of twelve.
Twelve years old. The marker doesn't flinch from it, and neither should we. The high childhood mortality rate of that era accounts for many of the graves at Rockhill, and you feel that weight when you walk the grounds.
The oldest dated stone marks the grave of a two-year-old named Willie Terrell, who died in 1881. Of the 148 known graves in this cemetery, 90 are unmarked. Ninety.
Names the ground has swallowed whole. Now, a cemetery committee stepped in and bought the site in 1919, making sure it would be cared for. But the community around it — well, Rockhill began to decline in the 1930s Depression, the way so many rural settlements did when hard times came calling and didn't leave.
The churches went quiet. The school closed its doors. The whole living fabric of Rockhill came undone.
But the cemetery remained. It's still there. A link, the marker says, to its past.
And that word — link — that's the right one. Because every unmarked grave, every small stone, every name still legible after all these years is a thread connecting us to people who worked that Franklin County land and loved their children and tried their best. Rockhill may be gone, but it hasn't entirely left.
What the marker says
This burial ground served the farming community of Rockhill, settled after the Civil War (1861-65). The high childhood mortality rate of that era accounts for many graves here. Earliest known burial was Mary Hitchens, who died about 1875 at age 12. Oldest dated stone marks the grave of two-year-old Willie Terrell (d. 1881) Of the 148 known graves, 90 are unmarked. A cemetery committee bought the site in 1919. Like many rural settlements, Rockhill began to decline in the 1930s Depression. The community's churches and school vanished, but the cemetery remains a link to its past. (1977)