In Druid Hill Park, wedged between the disc golf course and the drive that runs downhill past it, there's an overgrown cemetery with a twisted wrought-iron fence.
I'd long wondered whom its occupants were, so I decided to take a look today on my morning bike ride.
As it turns out, this is the Rogers-Buchanan Burial Ground, a family plot that belonged to the family that once owned the park's grounds.
A 100-foot pine was blown across the grave of Edmund Law Rogers, a founder of the Kappa Sigma fraternity and a prominent actor of the late 1800's. It must have blown down during Hurricane Isabel, but the tree is certainly not the only affront to this mostly untended plot.
The Rogers family's roots run deep, so to speak, in Baltimore; the land that is now the park was bought by Nicholas Rogers (II) in 1710.
His grandson, Col. Nicholas Rogers was an officer of the Baltimore Militia that routed the invading British at what is now Patterson Park.
And he's still here, though not exactly lying in glory.
If there's one thing Baltimore has plenty of, it's dead people. But only a few, like Edgar Allen Poe, are remembered with regularity. We've let the history of this city fade.
When we forget the dead, we forget the past, and as George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”.
The dead are trying to tell us something. If we don't listen, we'll be joining them sooner than we'd like.
[update]
Maybe they're speaking a little louder than I thought.
Not that I'm superstitious or anything, but after I downloaded the photos of the Rogers-Buchanan Burial Ground to my Mac this morning, the system locked up. When I restarted it, the hard disk's startup information had been corrupted. It tool multiple attempts with a disk utility and some tech sleight-of-hand to get it restored to normal.
Translation: my Mac was possessed. Hopefully, I've exorsised any remaining software demons.
