Modern Day Quarters and Ancient Gravestones

(Click on any picture to get a larger view.)

This past Saturday, Gryphon and I went off to Hollis to find The State Quarter Microcache. This cache is a clever one - the container is tiny, and very well hidden, but the clues to find it are dead on - so to speak! The location is pretty cool - it's in an old cemetery that has a mysterious tale!

The concept of the cache is simple - the container is a tiny dental floss package, and all that will fit in it is a quarter. The cache owners have declared it a swapping point for the state quarters that have been coming out for several years now, and they maintain a list of the quarters that have passed through the box at the listing for the cache (see link above).


Small cemeteries like this are one of New England's charms

Officially, this is called the Pine Hill Cemetery. Locally, though, it's known as Blood Cemetery. Some of the most prominent gravesites contain members of the Blood family, you see - some of them among the oldest burials in the cemetery. Among them is one Abel Blood, who was buried in 1867. (His father, also called Abel Blood, was buried nearby in 1820.)


Folkcat communes with an Abel Blood - but which one?

Abel Blood the younger has a decoratively carved headstone, with an image unique in all of the cemetery. At the top of the stone, a hand points heavenward. At least, in daylight hours it does. The story is that at nighttime, the hand can be found pointing in quite the opposite direction!


Gryphon checks on the Abel Blood story

We were there on a bright, sunny day, and we noticed nothing unusual. We spent some time looking around at the interesting carvings on the stones. Weeping willows are classic mourning imagery from the 1800's, and they were present on several stones.

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Three versions of weeping willows, dated (1) 1817, (2) 1827, and (3) 1844

Due to the heat, this was the only geocache we did this day. But it was a clever one, it took us off the beaten path to a lovely and sentimental location that we would never have known existed, and we got to do one of our favorite things - spend time together!


Happy Caching!