Graves near Porters Neck

Just saw the story on WECT about the graves near Porters Neck and Vantage Point in Plantation Landing. I went back there over three years ago, and only saw two headstones, not the ones they showed on TV. WECT and the Star-News don't have any stories online yet, so here's a picture I took back in the day...



Update: Here's the link to the WECT story, including video. More to come...

Update: The Star-News has a good follow-up article, here's a exerpt:

"The granite tombstone, in remarkably good shape for its age, peeked from the ground as gnarled trees and thick brush crowded in on all sides.

The headstone marks the final resting place of 19-year-old Morris Nichols. The date of his death is listed as 1796.

After brushing the smooth stone with his weathered hand, Cliff Williams poked the nearby ground with his 4-foot-long cemetery probe, a metal rod used to find soft spots in the ground that could show where bodies were buried.

It slipped easily into the soil at several places in the middle of the burgeoning Vineyard West neighborhood just south of Market Street, especially near some faded wooden markers.

"It's loaded," Williams said of the heavily wooded plot. "There's no telling how many people are buried back here."

But the final resting place could soon be the next-to-final final resting place for the estimated 30 residents of the overgrown cemetery.

The builder of the Porters Neck subdivision, which covers 43 acres and has 67 lots and is connected to the much larger Vineyard Plantation, has asked New Hanover County for permission to relocate the roughly half-acre cemetery to open up the land for development.

With homes going for $500,000 and the cemetery affecting three potential lots, it's an easy economic decision.

But Williams, a volunteer "cemetery cop," shook his head at the thought as he pointed out more old gravestones half hidden by the encroaching brush."