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Yorktown National Cemetery Caring For Hallowed Ground On October 27, 2006 I visited Yorktown National Cemetery, the Civil War-era cemetery that lies between the first and second siege lines (reconstructed) of the Revolutionary War Yorktown Battlefield. As I walked past the meticulously maintained markers, I noticed that a couple were missing, and that a couple of trees, that used to grow between two of the markers, had been removed - only the stumps remained, and these were cut off to about an inch above the ground. Also, a couple of the shrubberies had been uprooted. "Ernesto wreaked havoc here," I thought to myself. Tropical storm Ernesto had hit the Hampton Roads area on September 1, 2006. It had been a powerful storm but not a hurricane like Isabel (which hit on September 18, 2003), but it had also caused a lot of damage. View of Yorktown National Cemetery from outside the marl wall. I wondered, briefly, why the tree stumps had been left in the ground, instead of being dug out and removed completely. The groundsman's tale On November 1st, I walked from the Yorktown Visitors Center to small, historic Yorktown, adjacent to it. You follow a sidewalk through a copse of woods, and once you cross the bridge over the "Tobacco Road" far below, you come to the site of the Yorktown Victory Monument, (erected in 1881). As I walked past this monument, I saw two men busily shoveling dirt onto a section of ground, about six feet by six feet. I stopped to have a brief chat, and learned that they were subcontractors to the National Park Service. They'd been working busily up and down the Colonial Parkway, in Yorktown, and at the National Cemetery, cleaning up after Ernesto to get everything ready in time for the Yorktown 225th Anniversary events which took place on October 19-22, 2006. It turned out that Ernesto had downed over a hundred trees in the area. In the national forests fallen trees are left where they fell, but in places such as Yorktown, on battlefields, and in cemeteries, there are special requirements for cleaning up after nature's destruction. And thus I found out why the stumps in the Yorktown National Cemetery had not been dug out. The ground is not to be disturbed by human hands. The trees and shrubs can be taken away, but their roots must be left in the ground. (If the tree is uprooted, th roots are tipped back into the hole it left.) The stumps are then ground down in place, and then it and the woodchips are covered with soil - specially blended to match the soil already there. Then the soil is covered with grass seed - in this case fescue grass with winter rye mixed in, so it will take root and grow in the coming winter. I visited the Yorktown National Cemetery again on November 2, 2006, and indeed the tree stumps and dead shrubs had vanished. Apart from the fresh soil around the replaced headstones, no evidence remained of Ernesto's disturbance, and within a few months those marks will be gone as well, covered with fresh green grass. Thus is hallowed ground preserved.