It’s just at the south end of Dunbar Hollow Road, that’s where the Dunbars are buried. Not all of them mind you. There are some who because of dastardly deeds were banned from the cemetery. It’s a sad but true story of greed.
As the tale is told, Reuben Dunbar was afraid that his uncles’ two surviving sons would inherit property that he thought should go to him. Reuben was nearly twenty-one years old, newly married and he and his wife were expecting their first child. Reuben must have fretted terribly about the situation for one night when he’d been left in charge of his nephews, Stephen age 7 and David age 9, he took the boys into the woods and murdered them.
Reuben Dunbar was tried and found guilty. He was sentenced to death, and was hanged on the 31st of January 1851 for the murder of his nephews. The young boys were reportedly buried in the Dunbar Hollow Cemetery but no one knows for sure where Reuben was laid to rest, if indeed he ever found peace.
The cemetery is really quite ragged now with tombstones dislodged by trees, and the ravage of time has taken its toll. The carvings of names, birth dates and death dates are hardly legible on many of the marble headstones, worn away by rain and snow. There is a very old metal fence that supposedly encircles the graves, but tombstones are strewn about the area both inside and outside of the fence, and it’s really quite difficult to tell where the graves actually were. And it is such a strange sensation to walk in that area, the earth is so soft and thick with a dense groundcover you hardly know whose bones you might be treading on.
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