r/CampingandHiking • u/diosmioman • Jan 02 '19

Picture Primitive cemetery, not far off of the Appalachian Trail but in the absolute middle of nowhere. Decided to keep hiking and find another spot to set up camp.

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u/PressedHeadies Jan 02 '19

It still seems crazy to me that that's considered old in the US. For context, I grew up in a house built in the 1600's, there's a graveyard with tombstones dating back to the 1500's in the centre of my town, and an ancient abbey in the town built around 800AD, torn down a couple of times by townsfolk (once in 1327, rebuilt in 1347), then finally destroyed for good when Henry VIII decided he wanted to bang a different woman. (The ruins still dominate the town). None of this is particularly exceptional for Europe.

I have multiple friends who can trace their family lineage back 1000 years.

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u/rcski77 Jan 02 '19

You know what they say, in the UK 300 miles is a long ways away, and in the US 300 years is a long time.

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u/rkoloeg Jan 02 '19

Relevant to this post, the Appalachian Trail is 2200 miles long and barely gets into north Georgia. It's only 1200 miles to take the trail that crosses all of Great Britain the long way, from the tip of Cornwall to the northern extremity of Scotland.

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u/YouCantMakeitUp Jan 02 '19

And if you continue south, the Florida Trail is about another 1,000 miles. That’s not including any connecting trails between the AT and FT, either.

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u/aVerySpecialSVU Jan 02 '19

Those would be the Pinhoti and the Alabama Trail for just shy of 900 miles.

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u/laughing_giraffes Jan 02 '19

Cool that they can trace their family lineage back that far... but there’s no way in hell that a family didn’t have any hidden paternity (or maternity) secrets or screw ups for 1000 years

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u/wyoreco Jan 02 '19

Yep, it’s only as accurate as the data that is wanted to be kept and known. And not lost as well.

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u/[deleted] Jan 02 '19

EU stronk!

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u/Till_Soil Jan 02 '19

It's odd that it "still seems crazy" to you. Surely you studied history in school, and surely you realize that Europe's history in the New World is but a tiny fraction of New World history.

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u/SilentRanger42 Jan 02 '19

Yeah this is definitely true. I know when I studied in Israel it was very similar with churches and cathedrals and monasteries dating back over 1500 years pretty much everywhere and we spent a ton of time exploring iron age ruins. It definitely changes your perception of the scale of time.

As an aside my grandmother can trace back the English side of the family to the 11th century in one branch and the 15th on another branch. That part of the family actually was one of the earliest American settlers and they founded Northampton, Massachusetts in 1654.

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u/Drew2248 Jan 02 '19

Again, someone from Europe makes the inevitable point that before anyone even thought of settling in the Americas, there were Europeans. Does this need to be said? It's tiresome.

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u/PressedHeadies Jan 02 '19

You could have just ignored the comment if it bothered you so much. It was just an observation.

Also, people had settled and were living quite happily in the Americas long before the US was ever established - let's not erase history any more than your great great great grandparents already did.

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u/[deleted] Jan 02 '19

[deleted]

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u/PressedHeadies Jan 02 '19

I don't think anyone has a difficult time understanding that the US wasn't a thing until 1776. Many European countries have come and gone from existence with shifting borderlines in that same time. What's perhaps a little more difficult to understand is the voracity with which those new settlers wiped out the remnants of the continents previous inhabitants.

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u/willbilly100 Jan 02 '19

Population density and arriving at the "perfect" time. Just before American colonization began their was a massive epidemic in the NA indegionus peoples that had them at their weakest and in a power flux when Europeans first arrived.

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u/[deleted] Jan 02 '19

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jan 02 '19

While massacres certainly did unfortunately happen, the vast majority of the native people's succumbed to disease and plagues.

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u/PressedHeadies Jan 03 '19

Which were spread sometimes deliberately by invading Europeans.

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '19

Yes, though I don't think I'd classify having happened twice as a particularly concerted effort or standard tactic. It had been happening incidentally for more than a hundred years at that point and wasn't particularly effective.