A Tale of Two Cemeteries: Part I—Shoofly Pie in Baltimore County

This is the tale of two cemeteries, one rural and one urban. The immediate communities that anchored both have disappeared. The rural cemetery has continued. The urban one has disappeared, but it did not merely fade away: it was destroyed by being paved over.

The rural cemetery is the Long Green Mennonite Cemetery in the heart of the Long Green Valley, about 15 miles northeast of Baltimore, Maryland. An Amish Mennonite community was started there around 1833 and endured until the early 20th century. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother were part of this community and this cemetery is where my great-grandfather was buried.

The urban cemetery is the Brown Fellowship Society Cemetery at 54 Pitt Street, Charleston, SC. The property at 54 Pitt Street was purchased in 1794 by the members of the Brown Fellowship Society, who were the elite of Charleston's antebellum Free Persons of Color. Burials began almost immediately and continued at the Pitt Street location until the 1930s. Jane's great-great-great grandparents were buried there.


Shoofly Pie in Baltimore County: the Long Green Mennonite Cemetery

In a volume entitled The Amish in America: Settlements that Failed, 1840-1960 (Pathway: 1986), Amish historian David Luthy has compiled the stories of the Amish settlements that have failed. My ancestors have the dubious distinction of appearing in this volume no fewer than three times. I've already blogged about two of them: Newton and Jasper Counties, Indiana here, and Cheyenne County, Colorado here and here.

The third failed Amish settlement involving my ancestors was actually the oldest: around 1833, a group of Amish Mennonites from Lancaster County moved south across the Mason-Dixon Line to the Long Green Valley (also called Dulaney's Valley) northeast of Baltimore (MD) and started a community there.

Although the Amish have perennially looked for good farmland to work, it's not clear exactly what the immediate impetus might have been that caused this group of Lancaster County Amish to look for farmland elsewhere. Whatever their reasons for leaving, the low rolling hills and wide valley between Big Gunpowder Falls and Little Gunpowder Falls in Baltimore County were very good for farming, so that was where they settled.

Luthy records the family names of some of the settlers: Hertzler, Mast, Kennel, Miller, Warfel, and Yoder—all names that appear in my family tree. Of particular interest to us is the name Warfel: my great-grandfather was Eber Warfel, who was born in eastern Lancaster County in 1851 to Jacob and Elizabeth Warfel. (There appears to have been another Warfel—David—in the Long Green congregation, but he doesn't seem to be Eber's brother, also named David, as the birth and death dates are not close.)

Exactly when Eber arrived in Baltimore County is not clear. Most of the facts we have about him come from his obituary in the Herald of Truth (Vol. XVII, No. 9–September, 1880, pp. 171-2) which reads as follows:

August 1st, in Dulaney's Valley, Baltimore Co., Md., of typhoid fever, EBER M. WARFEL, aged 28 years, 3 months and 26 days. He made application to unite with the church, took instructions, but the Lord called him away before he was baptized, yet we hope that he is saved. Funeral services by Gideon Stoltzfus, in German, from John 5:24; and by Isaac Eby, in English, from Psalm 90. He leaves a bereaved wife and four small children to mourn their loss.

My great-grandfather Eber Warfel's headstone
at the Long Green Mennonite Cemetery,
Long Green, MD

The obituary notes that neither he nor his wife had yet been baptized into membership of the Long Green Amish Mennonite Church. Had they been members in a different Amish Mennonite congregation, they could have transferred their membership, but the fact that they were taking "instructions" (the Mennonite term for catechism classes) means that they had no other such membership.

Eber Warfel's German-born wife, Catherine "Katie" Schmidt, had arrived the U.S. with her family, or what was left of it, in 1861. Her mother had died at sea during the voyage and she and her younger brother were sent out to live in foster homes.

Katie married Eber in Baltimore County on 4 July 1873. and by 1880, they had four young children, the eldest of whom was my grandmother. And it was in 1880 that Eber contracted typhoid fever and died. After Eber died, the children, including my seven-year-old grandmother, were, like their mother, sent off to live in foster homes.

The Amish Mennonite community in the Long Green Valley had hardly been more robust than Eber Warfel. The congregation was never large. David Luthy turned up a blunt and rather telling assessment from a descendant of why the settlement had not grown:

"Long Green was a rich farming valley and land was cheap. More Lancaster County folks would have come had there been no slavery." (p. 169)

Although we have no record of what the original Long Green Amish settlers might have thought about slavery, it is nevertheless difficult to imagine that they were not acutely aware that their slave-owning neighbor from nearby Towson, Edward Gorsuch, had been shot and killed while attempting to retrieve some runaway slaves in Christiana, PA. Not to mention what they must have thought when John Wilkes Booth, a good friend of Gorsuch's whose family lived just east of the Long Green community, later assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. At least we can say that there is no record so far that any of the Long Green Amish owned slaves. On the other hand, nor is there any record that they helped with the Underground Railroad.

By the end of the XIXth century, original members were dying and their children were moving away. The small church house itself caught fire and burned in 1915, when some workers were clearing and burning brush in the area. It was never rebuilt.

The only remnant of the Long Green congregation is the cemetery. Along the wooded edge of  field, it is surrounded by a stone wall and has an iron gate.

Long Green Mennonite Cemetery
~12897 Kanes Rd., Glen Arm, MD
(The sign has recently been moved. This photo shows the current location.)

As the Amish Mennonite settlement was dying out, a Church of the Brethren group was moving in and establishing a congregation that still thrives. Every year on the first weekend after Labor Day, descendants of both the Amish Mennonite and the Brethren settlers meet for the "Long Green Annual Meeting" at the Long Green Valley Church of the Brethren. I don't know how many years this group has been meeting, but I clearly remember my grandmother, Eber and Katie's eldest daughter, talking about coming down to it and that will have been more than sixty years ago—but then, she was born in this valley, so for her, it was coming home.


Source: David Luthy, The Amish in America: Settlements That Failed, 1840–1960 (Pathway, 1986). The story of the Long Green settlement is pp. 169-174.