At the junction of Route 50 and Almshouse Road is the Old Whitemarsh Cemetery. It is named after the ruins of the old Whitemarsh Church, which burned to the ground back in 1897. It is unknown just how old the churchyard and cemetery is, but the earliest date on the stones is 1692.

The cemetery itself is still active, through Old Whitemarsh Cemetery, Trappe, Md, Inc., which will inter your remains there for $500. Should you avail yourself of this offer, you too can be decomposing next to such important cadavers as Robert Morris, father of the financier of the Revolution, or the illustrious Tilghman family- a founding family of Maryland's Eastern Shore.

This is the view from the road as you walk up to the ruins of the church. To the left of the archway is a little mailbox with a tombstone painted on it. If the flag's up then there should be little brochures about the place. They basically give a quick run-down of when the place was thought to be built (before 1692), who's buried here, and how much it'll cost to get yourself planted here.

There's only just the one front wall, bits of the two corners next to it, and this archway left of the church. I suppose it's not going to collapse on anyone soon, but step lively through it on your way inside- just in case.

Here's the memorial plate for the church's rector. Back in its heyday this church was "St. Peter's Parish", which served all of Talbot county from the Tred Avon River to Skipton Creek. Then as the town of Easton developed, an Episcopal cemetery was established in 1827. Apparently the Whitemarsh cemetery here wasn't good enough, so bodies began to be exhumed and moved to the new cemetery. By 1906 just twenty-one bodies were left here. Doesn't seem like a good way to honor the memory of the rector, does it? Stealing his congregation. Ah, well, people are funny about churches.

I couldn't make out most of the text of this stone, but it seems to tell the story of a poor British bastard with crummy luck. The gist of the story on the stone is that this guy came to America and fought on our side during the revolutionary war. He survived two naval campaigns against his former homeland and came to live in Maryland after the war ended. However, during a celebration of our independence he was killed by a malfunctioning firework. I wonder if they were made in Britain.

This is the coolest of the stones in the graveyard. I have no damned clue who the hell it's for or when they died, but it's the only one with any degree of sculpture. The footstone is wonderful as well, depicting the "winged hourglass" that signified our mortality.

Another nice old stone- this one was from 1792. Without using ink-rubbings I don't think I'd be able to make out the name on this one either. Moss, mold, and scaling on the rock has rendered the name illegible.

This stone has so much lichen growing in the letters that it looked as though someone had stuck an embroidered pillow into the grave instead of a headstone. Sadly, this one was illegible as well. So much for human vanity- the memorials all go the way of the flesh buried under them.

This is the ruined church as seen from the graveyard. The two deodorant-style markers in the foreground were placed in 1987. They seem so out of place when seen next to the crumbling stones from the 1700's. I really feel they should have closed off the original grave sections, and only kept the peripheral ones open.

If you're driving to or from Ocean City this summer, drop by this odd little ruin- it's worth the stop, and hopefully you'll get to explore it before they plant more deodorant there.