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Photos taken by Rick Hively.

Rick Hively sent me the following e-mail about Blackwood Cemetery:

This is an old cemetery in the middle of the woods in Nitro, WV, which is about 15 miles outside of Charleston, WV towards Huntington, WV.

Kids over the years have broken most of the headstones, including pushing three of them over the hill, and the top of another one over the hill.

The cemetery has a lot of history for the city of Nitro; the land that the city is on was owned by William R. Blackwood, whose headstone there is a picture of. Mr. Blackwood was also a soldier for the Confederacy in the Civil War and was captured by Union soldiers in 1864 and was held as a prisoner of war until the war ended.

When his wife, Henrietta, died in 1917, the land was purchased by the U.S. Government to establish an industrial town, Nitro, for industrial production for help in World War I.

We are trying to figure out a way to get the headstones that have been pushed over the hill back up to the top with the others, even though we would have no idea where in the cemetery they would go.

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