Gone and forgotten: The history buried in Nova Scotia’s abandoned cemeteries

In the past year, Abandoned Cemeteries of Nova Scotia has charted nearly 100 burial sites scattered across the province.

The only mark of “Baby’s” time on Earth is a tombstone with a rabbit engraving, slowly being swallowed by the wilds of Nova Scotia over more than a century.

Even that may have been lost had Steve Skafte not scoured the unruly fields of Plympton, Digby County, to find the Hardscratch burial ground guarded behind a rusty gate.

He cut through the thicket of pine trees, swept aside the blanket of deadfall and brushed off the moss shrouding the rickety cairn.

After clearing the area for future visitors, Skafte posted photos and GPS co-ordinates of the graves to Abandoned Cemeteries of Nova Scotia, a Facebook group devoted to chronicling orphaned burial grounds.

The gone and forgotten die twice, said Skafte – once in life, then again in memory. In that sense, he said, the project’s mission is to resurrect these crumbling monuments to Nova Scotia’s history.

“It’s like a first step to make sure it doesn’t disappear,” said Skafte, a writer and photographer based in Bridgetown. “We’ll make sure that if somebody comes along years later, and they’re all in worse state than I even found them, they’ll never be lost again.”

In the past year, Abandoned Cemeteries of Nova Scotia has charted nearly 100 burial sites scattered across the province, from the far reaches of Cape Breton to Skafte’s stomping grounds in Annapolis Valley, which has so many plots he refers to it as “the dead centre.”

A cemetery is considered “abandoned” if it doesn’t receive regular maintenance, but the overgrowth on many sites is so impenetrable that Skafte presumes they haven’t been touched in decades.