Indian Mound Cemetery

The cemetery on the hill above Romney is named for what lies beneath it: a prehistoric burial mound built by prehistoric Native people, probably between about one thousand and fifteen hundred years ago. Mound-building cultures of the Ohio River valley left earthworks across this stretch of Appalachia. When European settlers established a formal graveyard here in the eighteen hundreds, they built it around the mound rather than through it, leaving the ancient structure intact at the cemetery's center.

Soldiers of the Civil War, from both sides, are buried in the surrounding ground, along with two West Virginia governors. The mound and the gravestones together make this a layered burial site, with more than a thousand years of human history stacked on a single hillside above the South Branch of the Potomac.