COLD SPRING — When many look at a cemetery, they may see only a peaceful place where life has ended. George J. Carpenter sees a lot of history at Cold Spring Cemetery, where he has been superintendent for 28 years.

“Cemeteries are wonderful museums of a history of people that lived in the area,” he said. “All the preserved works of art tend to be funerary, going back to pyramids.”

Cold Spring Cemetery, founded in 1714, the only public cemetery south of Ocean City and one of the oldest cemeteries in the nation in continuous operation, is a National Historic Landmark. “You can’t spend every day out here for decades and not become a student of the place,” said Carpenter. “We have soldiers and sailors buried here from every war, from even before this was a country.”

The Veteran’s section of Cold Spring Cemetery is dedicated to Richard Weeks, the only casualty of the Revolutionary War in Cape May County, which occurred during the battle of Turtle Gut Inlet, June 29, 1776, a week before the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Turtle Gut Inlet was located near what is now Miami Avenue in Wildwood Crest near Sunset Lake. Weeks is buried in an unmarked grave.

The Nancy, an American blockade runner ship, was headed to Philadelphia with a shipment of gunpowder. A British frigate pursued the Nancy which had pulled into Turtle Gut Inlet. The gunpowder was off-loaded and the Nancy blown up by a delayed explosion when the British stepped aboard.

The cemetery has a tombstone from a graveyard that was located somewhere in the Town Bank area. That cemetery was used by the original settlers of the area, descendants of Pilgrims. Carpenter said crabbers reported seeing tombstones at low tide off Town Bank 40 to 50 years ago.

Since tombstones note the birth and death dates of the departed, Carpenter has an idea how long local residents lived from different eras. The area’s first settlers had short lives, often living only in their 50s.

In the oldest section of Cold Spring Cemetery, 40 percent of the graves are those of children. “I think the folks living down here being so isolated, were almost in the same predicament as the Native Americans were,” said Carpenter. “They had absolutely no immunity to certain diseases.” A cholera epidemic swept the Lower Cape in 1832 as well as the effects of a deadly flu outbreak in 1918. A public decry went out in 1917 for no public assemblies, causing Cold Spring Presbyterian Church to close for a few Sundays, a very rare event for the church that has been open for almost three centuries.

The cemetery has graves of sailors who frequented local ports, became ill and died here during the epidemic, said Carpenter.

He said the cemetery follows a chronological order, like the growth rings of a tree.

“You can stand anywhere in the old yard and put yourself, if you are aware of it, into an era where a certain event happened in this country and the world,” said Carpenter.

The cemetery has a number of graves from the Great Depression, but very few are marked, Carpenter said, indicative of a very poor economy. Early gravestones in the cemetery are flat, tall stones, usually sandstone, made deliberately plain.

“The original worshipers here had an indifference to bragging and boasting about ones’ means, everyone was equal,” said Carpenter.

Carpenter has unearthed pottery, horseshoes, broken glass, iron and even the bones of a horse on the cemetery which was once farmland.

A burial ledger shows entries “for an unknown man.” Carpenter said he believes the very poor may have buried their dead under cover of darkness without informing the cemetery.

Carpenter worked in graves registration while serving in Vietnam. After the war, he dug graves, by hand, in the tiny Mt. Moriah Cemetery in Lower Township.

“You’re either a cemeterian or not,” he said, noting the psychological complexities of dealing with people in grief.

The 45-acre cemetery has enough space remaining to serve the community for the next 40 to 50 years, said Carpenter.

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