This Samuel Davies tombstone is one of the three very early Welsh tombstones in Maplewood Cemetery, Carbondale. As you can see in the photos above, Samuel Davies was born in Llanguic, Wales, and died at the age of 26 in 1833.
Over 7,000 interments have been made in Maplewood Cemetery in the past 180+ years, but these three Welsh stones are the only ones in the cemetery that are made of this beautiful reddish/brown stone, on which the inscriptions are as clear and readable today as they were on the day they were carved, by a highly skilled stone carver (surely a Welshman).
What is the material out of which these tombstones are made? Is this a Welsh stone? Did these early Welsh people who came to Carbondale to work in the anthracite mines here bring with them from Wales the stones that would ultimately become their tombstones?
We would very much like to hear from anyone who can help us answer these unanswered questions about these stones.
One of the Welsh tombstones in Carbondale's Maplewood Cemetery. This stone marks the grave of Mary Davis, who died on January 30, 1832, at the age of 44. She was the wife of the Reverend John Davis.
The Reverend John Davis and his wife Mary were among the twenty Welsh families who were brought to Carbondale from Wales by the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company in the late 1820s for the specific purpose of teaching the D&H the techniques and procedures of deep underground anthracite coal mining.
