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Buried among decades of change |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Friday, 08 April 2005 |
140-year-old Shealey cemetery sits on possible student housing site near Towson circle, shops
At the edge of a long flat parking lot east of York Road, behind Burger King, across the street from a high-rise condominium, through a rusty iron fence, there's a cemetery. For 140 years, a tiny, family-owned plot of land along Shealey Avenue has served as the final resting place for at least three -- and possibly as many as 18 -- former residents of Towson. Only one gravestone has survived the decades.
Heritage Properties, which owns the Towson Circle parking lot that surrounds the cemetery, plans to construct housing for 600 students and a large retail complex on top of the parking spaces. But a small green space will be preserved around the edges of the gravesite.
There are no precise records of who is buried in the small square patch of land, but several members of the Shealey family are known to be buried there. The Shealeys were one of the first families to settle in Towson.
The cemetery rests along a narrow street named Shealy Avenue. (When Baltimore County printed a sign for the street, they forgot to include the second "e" in Shealey.) In 1996, after a newspaper article detailed the "poor condition" of the cemetery, Towson's chapter of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity offered to help with the cleanup. But any improvements were temporary. Step inside the fence today, and bottles of Jack Daniels litter the well-worn grass. The ground is littered with fast food wrappers and coffee cups. A Spree wrapper is twisted around a tree limb. The Burger King drive-through speaker can be heard in the distance.
Towson's first archeological dig
In the third drawer of a filing cabinet in Room 406 of the County Courthouse Building, a yellowed folder labeled "Shealey Cemetery" has collected dust for years.
There's a newspaper clipping from 1884 marking the passing of Daniel Shealey, who died at age 83. He was buried in the cemetery, "where the remains of his father and mother repose," the paragraph says.
Documents in the folder explain how the cemetery's position, at the corner of a large, valuable plot of land in downtown Towson, has resulted in occasional skirmishes between preservationists and developers.
In 1987, Baltimore County considered building a $2 million Towson Transit Center along Joppa Road. One of the proposals would have placed the transit center next to the cemetery.
"The MTA said they would build around it, but we think that is just dreadful," Sharon Shealey Lewis told the Towson Times in October of that year.
Over the years, the Shealey family had trouble documenting ownership of the plot. "The graveyard has been in our family since 1837," Shealey told the Baltimore Sun at the time.
In April of 1996, descendants of the Shealey family met with representatives of Heritage Properties, as the company was preparing to build a five-level parking garage next to the cemetery.
The 800-car parking garage would have served patrons of the Towson Circle retail project.
According to records of the meeting, one of the attendees suggested digging up the bodies and burying them in a new location. But the family members weren't in favor of that idea.
In fact, they suggested the cemetery could be bigger than it seemed. Helen Shealey suggested people could be buried outside the fence that encircles the plot.
So one Saturday afternoon, Heritage donated a backhoe and several local citizens started digging. This is how The Sun put it on June 14, 1996: "Downtown Towson is about to have its first archeological dig -- thanks to a tiny family cemetery that is delaying a $25 million redevelopment project."
The dig didn't turn anything up outside the fence, though. The cemetery returned to its quiet existence.
Only one gravestone remains.
In 1996, only two gravestones (and one foot marker, inscribed with an "AY") were still poking their heads out of the grass. One of the stones said:
"Sacred to the memory of Joseph Yost, who departed this life April 24, 1836, in the 35th year of his age."
Visit the cemetery today, and Joseph Yost's gravestone is missing. All that remains is one broken stone, half a foot tall, that sits on the edge of the cemetery.
Only one gravestone is completely intact. It reads:
"In memory of Catharine Schmuck, wife of Solomon Schmuck, who was born November the 30th 1767 and died on the 7th of December 1831. Aged 67 years and 22 days." It's impossible to read the rest of the text.
Schmuck rests in the center of the cemetery, under a tall tree. As the community has grown from a crossroads to a county seat and college town, the gravestone seems to have been left untouched.
The streetscape along Shealey Avenue will change once again, but Joseph Yost and Catharine Schmuck will still be there.
by Brian Stelter April 7, 2005
The Towerlight
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