Unexpected

I was looking at Google Maps awhile back, figuring out the distances between two places in my neighborhood, when I noticed a pin just across the District line, labeled "Samuel Shoemaker Family Cemetery."  I had walked the streets of this Bethesda neighborhood many times and never noticed anything other than shady streets, a community pool, and houses of various sizes and vintages.

I couldn't help myself.  I had to investigate!

Even though the site was clearly located on the map, it took me awhile to figure out the access point as I certainly did not want to go tromping through anyone's yard. Finally, I found a grassy lane off of Allan Road that took me behind the backyards of the houses fronting on Bayard Boulevard (a street far less fancy than its name). 

There I found a small plot, no bigger than 20' by 20'. Half a dozen tombstones are protected by a wrought iron fence, bearing the names of various members of the Shoemaker family who lived in this area in the mid 19th century.  A little Googling revealed that the Shoemakers were Quakers who emigrated to Montgomery County, Maryland from the Philadelphia area. They farmed in the area now known as Yorktown Village and Westmoreland Hills, leaving little behind when the land was developed starting in the 1930s and kicking into high gear in the 1950s and 60s.  There's a Civil War fortification, Battery Bailey, nearby but otherwise little left of the Shoemakers and their neighbors, save for Shoemaker Farm Lane which cuts between high-rise apartment buildings in Friendship Heights.  And there's no trace of another family cemetery, that of the Isaac Shoemaker family, other than a pin on Google Maps.

In Europe, a graveyard of this vintage would scarcely merit a mention; a small church in a rural English village I visited last summer dated back to the Middle Ages. But here in the new world, it's still pretty cool to find a trace of an even more recent past, especially when it's entirely unexpected.