Fraternity-Testvériség, 1999 (77. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)
1999-10-01 / 3. szám
FRATERNITY Page 9 i 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 grave 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 there then. Over time, some of the stones have been overturned or broken, and some graves, not originally marked by anything as substantial as stone, are probably lost forever. Embedded in one of the taller headstones, marking the grave of a 17-year-old girl who died in 1933, is a porcelain or china oval to which her photograph was remarkably transferred by 1930s technology. The picture of the lovely girl is as clear as if it had been taken yesterday. Apparently lost over the years is information about who was in charge of the cemetery, as well as any records about all those who are buried there. The only information is on the headstones themselves. Dr. Molnár, for whom this segment of the trip was admittedly a “kind of pilgrimage” as well of historical interest, said that his father, a builder who emigrated from Hungary in 1910, lived and worked in Clinchfield and Dante for 11 months before deciding that his original craft was more to his liking than coal mining. The elder Molnár then moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Dr. Molnár was reared. Dr. Molnár said that he visited Dante with his father about 45 years ago. A member of the American Hungarian Foundation for 45 years, Dr. Molnár a former Rutgers University professor, specializes in immigration history. He lives in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the headquarters city of the Foundation. One of his many history-based interests is collecting photographs of monuments of Hungarians in the United States, and he categorized the Hungarian Cemetery as one of those. He said he considers these monuments, such as the one erected in Connellsville, a small Pennsylvania mining town, in memory of a large group of coal miners killed in a mine accident there in 1907, to be tributes to some of the people who helped build America. Dr. Molnár also visited the Oxbow Center to see the Dante History Project and said that it’s a shame that more work like the Dante Project isn’t being done throughout the country. “It’s almost impossible to write the history of an area on a large scale,” he said, “without having this Continued on page 10
