Bethlen Almanac 1999 (Ligonier)
The Hungarian Reformed Federation of America
Restoration of a Hungarian Cemetery in Virginia If the trees and brush weren’t so dense, you could see the old Hungarian Cemetery from your car driving north on Route 63 toward Dante, Virginia. From that perspective, it’s to the left of the highway, about a quarter of a mile or less south of Sun. We visited the cemetery, accompanying Dr. August Molnár, president of the American Hungarian Foundation, and Jack Clay and Alex Szabó. The two Castlewood men were escorting Dr. Molnár to several places he wanted to see during his one-day visit to the area. Several weeks ago, Kathy Shearer of People, Inc., had told me that Dr. Molnár had heard about the Dante History Project from the Hungarian Reformed Federation of America, and so he included St. Paul, where the Dante History Project is currently on display at the Oxbow Center, and the Hungarian Cemetery on his itinerary for a fairly lengthy trip he had planned for these first weeks in August. The cemetery, neglected for many of the last forty years, has become the subject of considerable interest recently, as its restoration has been taken on as an Eagle Scout project by Shane Kenyon, a member of Castlewood Boy Scout Troop 260. Assisting him are Jack Clay, serving as his counselor; George Campbell, Institutional Representative for the troop; Scoutmaster Jackie Grizzle; Assistant Scoutmaster Jason Harvey; volunteer Darrell Hensley; and Troop 260 volunteers Andrew Hensley, Jerry Lampkins, Dustin Holbrook and Daniel Johnson. They have been working in the cemetery for several months. The project was made even more of a challenge because there was no easy way to reach the cemetery - a walking path had to be cut up the steep hill to the cemetery site, and then the masses of brush had to be cut away in the cemetery itself. Some of the headstones—and there are dozens and dozens of them—are still upright and intact. With inscriptions primarily in Hungarian, the stones’ messages were easily translated by Dr. Molnár. One stone was in Greek, highlighting the fact that while around ninety percent of the cemetery’s graves are of those with Hungarian roots, the cemetery was used by several of the immigrant groups which settled in Dante during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to help build the area’s railroads and mine its coal. The cemetery was used last during the early fifties—Jack Clay said that several members of the Boris family of Dante were buried 28
