Priscilla  and I visited the Greenwood Cemetery on Greenwood Church Road  in Carroll County, Maryland, during May of 1999 and 2000. We took lots of  pictures of my ancestors' gravestones, most of which were from the 1800s.

The sloping acre of land was originally donated in the 1700s by Philip Greenwood, my 4th-great-grandfather, a blacksmith in the part of Frederick County that became Carroll County in 1837.  The property was part of a tract called Poplar Springs, a land parcel patented to Philip on August 10, 1753. It was near the old wagon road that went from John Diggs Copper Works to Baltimoretown. The land  was donated to build a schoolhouse, appropriately called Greenwood Schoolhouse. Later, the red brick building became Greenwood Church and Cemetery. It is still in use in 2000.

The oldest gravestone in the cemetery was Philip Greenwood's.  He died on January 17, 1780, in Frederick County. The monument is no longer there.

Much of the information about the history of the church and cemetery comes from an out-of-print book written in 1983 by Sharon Burleson Schuster who lives nearby. It's The History of Greenwood Church , New Windsor, Maryland.

To be continued....

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