ABC Cemetery - Bedford VA

I visited the “ABC” cemetery in Bedford VA for the first time on March 29^th 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.