The Old Burying Ground of Beaufort
Beaufort, North Carolina, United States
An early-1700s coastal burying ground holding sea-captains graves, folk-art markers, and the well-documented legend of the little girl buried in a barrel of rum.
Beaufort's Old Burying Ground has buried the town's dead since the early 1700s, on a coastal lot where storms, tides, and time have tilted the stones into a landscape that reads like a ship wrecked into graves. Its markers include slate carvings, wooden markers, and folk-art work of the coastal south, and its stories include British sailors buried upright facing the sea and a mass grave of a fever ship's crew.
The famous legend is the "rum keg girl": a child who died at sea was brought home preserved in a cask of rum and buried whole, and her grave became the site of tokens and gifts. Coastal Review and state researchers traced the story to the real Virginia Bell family and the real child's grave, the legend grown from a documented burial. The gap between the two is exactly what makes the site worth reading.
Visiting
Ann St, Beaufort NC; open daily; see the NC Historical Sites pages.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Burying_Ground,_Beaufort_NC_01.jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories