Historic graveyard on Augusta's Miracle Mile faces rezoning. Here's what we know.

A 200-year-old cemetery in a busy Augusta industrial area could be rezoned to help ensure the graves stay.

The 1.6-acre Cottage Cemetery sits at 1775 Marvin Griffin Rd., between Apple Valley Park and a lot that has been used to store commercial-grade dumpsters for a waste management company. It’s the last piece of land still zoned as residential on the stretch of road off Mike Padgett Highway dubbed the “Miracle Mile” in the 1960s for its ability to successfully attract industry.

Now representatives of the cemetery have applied to the city of Augusta with two requests: Rezone the graveyard as light-industrial to conform with surrounding property and provide a special exception to allow the cemetery to upkeep its nonindustrial purpose.

The cemetery was established by Oswell Eve, a sea captain and a planter, who moved to the Augusta area circa 1800 with his wife, the former Aphra Ann Pritchard, and their family. The summer home he built here, The Cottage House, stood where Augusta’s Apple Valley neighborhood sits today. Eve established the family cemetery about a half-mile away.

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Perpetual care of the site declined through the rest of the 19th century. A 1911 Augusta Chronicle article about Cottage Cemetery reported overgrown graves and broken tombstones. The first recorded burial there in 1803 was for the Eves’ 12th child, Augusta Belinda, who died in infancy. By 1911, her tombstone had been stolen, The Chronicle reported.

Infrequent cemetery cleanups followed. An alumni group from Virginia Military Institute visited Cottage Cemetery in 2004 and couldn’t immediately find the grave of William Smith Carmichael, a 1869 VMI graduate and locomotive engineer, amid the unkempt stones.

The difficulty in locating Carmichael helped spur descendants of the cemetery’s occupants to form the Cottage Cemetery Cousin Committee, now known as Augusta’s Historic Cottage Cemetery. The group now maintains a sustained effort to preserve the property and to repair damaged headstones.

The Augusta Planning Commission is scheduled to hear the rezoning request at its next meeting April 1.