Macon's Grave

When you travel a bunch of back roads and stop at just about anything that looks interesting you come across some very strange things. The picture about is one of those things, but more on that later.

We were going to stay in Richmond for a week but we had trouble finding a campground in the area, we did find one but we decided that I didn't have enough guns in the rig to make it a safe stay. We were going to spend the weekend at the National Folk Festival, which was being held in Richmond this year except Tropical Storm Tammy decided that she was going to make it the wettest weekend of the year so we just kept heading south. After a very long drive in a very heavy rain we got off the freeway at Roanoke Rapids for dinner and found nice little campground, since it was going to rain non-stop for the entire weekend we decided that this was home and we would spend the weekend watching football and the baseball playoffs.

It's Monday morning, and sometime during the night the rains have stopped so we jumped in the car and decided to check out the area, the town has an old canal with a couple of mills and an aqueduct that went around the rapids. Today it's a seven mile walking path which takes you from one side of town to the other following the old canal, actually the canal is dry and you walk in the middle of what was the canal and across the old aqueduct. After the walk we took a drive out around the lakes and came across what the historical marker said was Macon's Grave 2 miles north, now how can you not make a right turn to find out what this is all about.

Macon's Grave is a small family cemetery across from where the family farm was located. Nathaniel Macon was a soldier in the Revolutionary war, serving at the surrender of Fort Moultrie, the fall of Charleston, the rout at Camden, and with General Nathaniel Greene in his retreat across Carolina. When he left the military he refused a pension and all pay for his military service, he went on to serve as a congressman and US Senator for the next 37 years, Macon, Georgia and Fort Macon are both named in his honor. Now after all this you have to wonder why some thugs would dump a truckload of stones on top of his grave, well they didn't. He requested that at his death no grief be expressed and that dinner and a grog be served and that all his friends cast a stone on his grave, which they did. Over the years the tradition has continued and anyone visiting his grave brings a stone to throw onto the pile, which now covers the graves of his wife, son and grandson. Really it's true, you could look it up.

Jim n Cathy