In an interesting story a genealogy society finds remnants of a nearly forgotten cemetery among the trees and brush. Read more about their find in an article from the aikenstandard.com:
Genealogy society finds remnants of cemetery
By Suzanne Stone
Members of the Aiken Barnwell Genealogy Society have found a few remnants of local history tucked away behind trees and brush in a forgotten corner of Aiken County property.
Cynthia Hardy, editor of the society’s journal, has been in search of general information on the Aiken County Home – also known during its existence from the late 1800s to 1937 as the Aiken Poor Home or the Alms House – since she joined the society in 2003.
Hardy began to suspect the Poor Home must have had cemetery grounds – one for black residents, another for white – after she began transcribing the facility’s records in 2004, which she found in the South Carolina Archives.
With the assistance of Pope Cook, whose father was the Poor Home’s last superintendent and who spent time there as a child, Hardy and the society members have located a few timeworn scraps of the Poor Home’s cemetery for white residents in a wooded area behind the Aiken SPCA, the Aiken County Animal Shelter and the Doris Gravat Detention Center on Wire Road. The find includes one intact headstone, a wrought-iron floral bouquet holder, a wooden plaque worn smooth and free of carvings by time and weather, a glass ornament they believe to be part of a grave marker, a few more unreadable stones and depressions in the ground that may be indicative of burial sites.