A Boo-tiful Day to Visit a Cemetery

Crawford Settlement Burying Ground
Date Visited:  June 2, 2019
Stop:  #1

June 2 was a gorgeous Spring day in Michigan, which if you live here, you know that was a rarity.  It was a perfect day to begin our Michigan Wines and Signs Quest.  My wife had been asking all weekend to visit the Sage Creek Winery so I referred to my newly constructed Wine and Sign map and noticed that there were several Michigan Historical Markers between our home and the winery.  Our first stop would be the Crawford Settlement Burying Ground.  

Not sure visiting the dead is an uplifting way to begin a quest, but that was our destination as we headed east on 26 Mile Road.  The actual name of the cemetery is Meade Cemetery and is located 0.6 miles east of North Avenue on the south side of 26 Mile Road.  I had not discovered the errors of the sign locations yet, so we had no real idea where the marker was located.  We pulled into the cemetery and headed south on the dirt road all the way to the rear of the cemetery.  No sign found yet so we turned left and caught the next dirt road heading north.  We came to the end of that road when I happened to catch the sign out of the corner of my eye, located at what looks to be the original entrance to the cemetery.  We parked and walked a short distance to the sign, which is only a few feet off of 26 Mile Road.

It was very humbling to be standing amongst war veterans from every major American war since the Revolution.  Many of the gravesites were marked with small metal signs indicating the war in which the deceased had fought.  The headstone for John Crawford, the founder of the cemetery and himself a war veteran from the Revolution, is a few short feet south and west of the Michigan Historical Marker.  You could easily spend an hour or so walking through this historic cemetery looking for the gravesites of our war veterans.  Beyond that, there was not much else to see or do there, so we hopped back in the car and headed to our next destination.

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