A curious landmark.
These days, I take a slight
detour on the way to work, when I can make it through the turn (i.e., when no one is blocking the intersection), to avoid a traffic light and some other left turns usually required to enter my place of employment. I don't know the name of this road, offhand, but there's not a lot on it, although the growth has exploded in recent months. There's a
realtor office,
TAG Computers building, and a
Pan-Am building... not much else.
There are a few unused, but presumably sold and/or speculative, lots off this road. As property costs are
skyrocketing out here, people are trying to make a mint, selling
commercial real estate. Most of these lots tend to have gravel-dirt driveways, with big rocks, or something else equally obstructive, blocking entrance. This is why I never noticed Tippett Hill before.
Across a gravelly,
red clay entrance that seems to lead into a
splotch of
old-growth forest, is a cable attached to two small posts. On an old tree, off to the side, is nailed a very simple, black-and white metal sign about the size of a licence plate, that reads:
TIPPETT HILL CEMETERY
The first time I saw it, I was curiously drawn to finding out more about this
sacramental parcel of land. Not in a
morbid sort of way, mind you -- it was more at an immediate wonder about this apparent
dichotomy of some old
cemetery in a newly rapid-growth area. This said,
curiosity was mostly passing, in that I never remembered exactly how to spell the name, or simply to do some online research, in the two weeks that followed my
initial observation.
Tonight however, shortly before going to bed, something made me think about it, so I did some quick web research to look it up. As it stands, there's not a lot out there. After finally getting the spelling right, Google only returns five results for "
Tippett Hill", and only two have anything to do with this cemetery. After seeing it in the Loudoun Cemetery Database, however, my interest is even more intent.
It seems Tippett Hill was a community cemetery, whose earliest burial was in
1908 and, although most are earlier, whose last burial was performed in
1994. The latter doesn't feel all that long ago, but eastern
Loudoun wasn't all that big back then, either. There are several children (indicated as "baby" in the name record) buried here. Most interesting to me, however, is the 1994 burial, simply labelled as "Froggy,". Is that a last name? Where is the
surname? Is it a
nickname? Hm...
One of these days, I want to take a short trip out there and visit, and it's not through any desire to do something
intrusive. I simply have this sort of "
spider sense" that I could learn a lot about the area in which I live, by visiting Tippett Hill.