Union Bethel Civil War Cemetery in Lower Township, NJ

I was just saying (wasn't I, Fred?) that I would like to find an old cemetery to photograph. I was imagining weather-worn gravestones with delightfully old-fashioned names, and cryptic hints to the stories of the people buried long ago. Then I found this handy-dandy new brochure

which features a large map of all sorts of historic locations in Cape May County including an African American Civil War Cemetery right here in Lower Township. I've lived here off and on for half a century,  and I never knew this cemetery existed. Many of its residents were buried a hundred years before I was a glimmer in my mama's eye. Imagine that.

I quick search on Google yielded this article about efforts to clean up the cemetery by members of the US Coast Guard ("Coasties"!) stationed in Cape May and some local Boy Scouts. I was intrigued about this mysterious place and set off with my camera this morning to check it out.


There were Vances (that's an old Cape May name) and lots of Trustys (I never heard that name around here), ministers from the Union Bethel Church and their wives, young people and old people, broken stones and replacement stones for some of the veterans. I brought little flags to leave by the stones I photographed, but the veterans already had much nicer ones.

Rev. Simon Taylor (1801-1882)

Priscilla was the beloved wife of Rev. Taylor and she died in 1875. Dig that cool font!

Rev. Edward C. Turner (1818-1905)

Here's Keziah Turner, Rev. Turner's wife (1825-1896)

Isaac H. Turner (1833-1932) was probably related to the Reverend above, but how? (Mr. Turner was presented with a modern replacement marker.)

I happened upon some beguiling old-fashioned names:

Araminta Green (1861-1897)

Job Humphries (1882-1955)

All we know about Sina Boze is that she was someone's daughter and she died in 1878. (And the spiders like her stone.)

With colorful names like those, don't you wish you knew the stories of these people? Here's a story I knew nothing about and I wish I knew more than what shows on the monument. The Delaware Bay Beach is my favorite place on earth, you know.

Here's something I haven't seen before. I thought they were baby headstones, but no, they seem to be foot-stones. They were placed about a person's length from the back, or blank side of the bigger headstones, and some had the initials of the deceased. Some were blank.

I'm no expert on cemeteries, but I've never seen foot-stones before.

This is not a big cemetery. I took about an hour to snap photos of just about every grave marker. I picked a muggy and buggy day to visit, and wished I had my bug spray. I did some preparation before visiting, and all the photographic advice I found was focused on what time of day the sunlight would be hitting the engraved sides of the stones. I'm pretty sure these were west-facing stones (correct me if I'm wrong), but this would mean that I should visit in late afternoon. Well, I didn't, and it didn't matter because the sunlight was diffused by trees. When was the last time you saw a cemetery with so many trees?

Wide-angle view.

I saved the best for last: Ms. Rhuma Squirel (one R). Is that the most adorable name ever? The Rhuma part is unique, but Squirel (one R) is the coolest. All we have is her age and death date, no clues to her life at all. There were no other Squirels in the cemetery, at least no markers for any Squirels. What could her story be? I'm intrigued. I might even bring her some flowers next week...

Rhuma Squirel ( 1789-1871)

Cape May's World War II Observation Tower

I chatted with World War II veterans at the restored observation tower and learned some stuff I didn't know. This mysterious structure has intrigued me since I was a child. It stood there with no explanation just down Sunset Boulevard from Sunset Beach and the sunken concrete ship Atlantus.
It looked creepy and spooky. The tower was finally restored over the winter of 2008-2009 by Cape May's Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts and Humanities and opened to the public in March 2009.

Signs, officially called "interpretive panels," tell the history of the tower. It was built in 1942 as part of Fort Miles. Fort Miles was mainly situated on Delaware's Cape Henlopen, with some sites on Cape May. Originally it was called Fire Tower #23, and there were eleven others on the Delaware coast and three others in the Cape May area. The towers were staffed by soldiers who were charged with guarding the Delaware Bay and River from German U-boats. The ports upriver (Camden, Philadelphia, etc.) were though to be prime targets. Part way up the spiral stairs is an engaging memorial to local veterans showing then and now photographs. A couple more flights and there is the soldiers' "Dayroom" or lounge.


From the veterans last weekend, I learned that these towers were actually decommissioned in 1944. The army figured that if there were German U-boats approaching, they wouldn't be seen anyway because they would be under water. Also, the shipping channel, closer to the Delaware side of the bay, was not deep enough for the U-boats to submerge to sneak up on us. After the decommissioning, those two thousand soldiers involved were reassigned and the towers were staffed by volunteers until the end of the war.

I had been wondering about communication, too. How did the soldiers in this tower communicate with those in the other towers and on the base manning the big guns? (Cape May was remote when I was a child--imagine thirty years before that.) My question was answered by the equipment hanging on the wall and explained by the veteran at the top of the tower Sunday: they used radios until telephone lines were put up. Telephone lines, as you might imagine, were much more secure than radio transmissions.

The tower now has metal, spiral stairs up to its sixth-story top, but those don't seem military.
What did the soldiers use in the 1940s? The veterans explained to me that there were straight wooden ladders running up along the inside of the tower. They were staggered and passed through manhole-sized openings. If a soldier fell, he wouldn't fall all the way down because each ladder ended and a new one started on the opposite side of each floor.


The restored tower is no longer creepy to me. It is a meaningful memorial to the Cape May residents who fought for our country and a great addition to Cape May's riveting World War II destinations. How lucky are we that there are still veterans from that Greatest Generation willing to share their knowledge with us today?!

The view from the top: