Bridgewater Cemetery

At Bridgewater Cemetery, visitors describe a glowing tombstone near the front gate, said locally to be a man who still stands watch after dark. First entered in 1820 by Jabez Reeve, Bridgewater Cemetery sits isolated on a Scott County hillside and holds many Civil War-era burials. Its history carries real weight: Black people were barred from burial inside the cemetery itself, and what's remembered locally as the "death tree" still stands outside its front gates, tied to the hanging of Black residents in the era of racial terror that followed the Civil War; those buried outside the grounds as "undesirable" were marked only with rough, unmarked field stones rather than headstones. The Scott County Cemetery Commission has since cleaned and restored the grounds, which remain in occasional use today.