I visited the “ABC” cemetery in
Bedford VA for the first time on March 29th 2014. For those of you
who do not know what the ABC cemetery is I will give you a little background
information. The ABC cemetery is located at Antioch Baptist Church. When you
first take a look at the property the church as well as the cemetery look
normal. I am used to seeing cemeteries in churches so at first I did not really
see what was so special about the cemetery. That was until I took a look up
close at the headstones.
Upon walking up close to the
headstones, I started to notice a pattern. All of the headstones were in order
by last name. As I walked down the different rows of the headstones I noticed
that every row was ordered in the same manner. Upon research I found out that
this was because of the original care-taker of the cemetery, Mr. Thomas
Aadland.
Mr. Aadland had a very OCD mindset
and carried this into his line of work as care-taker of the cemetery. Mr.
Aadland would arrange all of the graves and headstones to keep the cemetery
organized in alphabetical order. Aadland was able to accomplish this by having
families sign a document stating that he was able to move the graves around.
When I went to the cemetery I was surprised at how big the cemetery actually
was. In being so big that means that all of those families signed the waiver. When
seeing this it made me think about if I would want my family to sign a document
like this if I passed away. I don’t know if I would want to be exhumed and
moved around all of the time like these graves were.
When Aadland was coming close to
his death in 1992 he came to the realization that there would not be anyone to
move all of the graves around to place his grave in the correct order. With his
last name starting with an A, a lot of graves would have to be dug up and moved
around to keep everything in order. Aadland had to come up with some way of
keeping his cemetery in order. Due to this Aadland came up with the idea of
changing his name. In changing his name from Thomas Aadland to Thomas
Zuckerman, he would now be at the end of the grave sites and no extra moving
around would be required.
Traveling
to this cemetery made me realize all of the cool things there really are in and
around Lynchburg to do. I definitely have never heard of the idea of an alphabetical
gravesite before and really makes Lynchburg special and an interesting place to
visit and live.
