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EDEN - Fifty years of history, buried beneath a tangle of weeds and grass.

Since March , 17 -year-old Joshua “Colin” Clark  has made it his mission to clean up a long-forgotten cemetery in the Spray area of Eden. It started as a last-minute Eagle Scout project. But the work now intrigues him.

“There’s a lot of history there,” Clark said. “There’s a lot of neat stones. There’s a lot of mystery out there, too.”

Crumbled headstones leave few, if any, clues. But fallen monuments become windows to a bygone era.

“We found a few cool ones,” Clark said, noting monuments to the Improved Order of Red Men , a fraternal organization with roots dating to the Sons of Liberty, and Woodmen of the World , a service organization.

Spray Cemetery’s  roughly 120  graves sit on about an acre  of land near First Wesleyan Church .

“It’s been forgotten. Nobody knew it was there until we started cleaning it,” said David Clay II, 52 , a member of the Eden Preservation Society  who recruited Clark and the Boy Scouts to help at Spray.

His work uncovering two smaller cemeteries led the group to form a special cemetery committee with Clay in charge.

Reynolds Cemetery, off Country Club Drive  near Morehead High School, has six  graves. It is named after the Reynolds family and includes the burial site of Prudence Morehead Reynolds , the sister of former Gov. John Motley Morehead , Clay said.

Barnett Cemetery, at Hollingsworth and Morehead streets , has five  graves. Clay believes the Barnetts buried there in the 1820s and ’30s  may be related to the James Barnett who built the canal and grist mill in the Spray area.

Spray Cemetery is by far the largest the group has worked on.

Boy Scout Troop 567  started helping at Spray after Clay stopped by a meeting to tell the troop about his work. Clark was there, his Eagle Scout deadline looming.

“He took on that responsibility, and he just amazed me, organizing people to get out there to work and finding donations of equipment and supplies,” Clay said.

Clark has promised to come back from school at Appalachian State on weekends to help other volunteers at the cemeteries.

Their work is far from done.

All the cemeteries were found on county records, which indicate at least 170  cemeteries in Rockingham County, Clay said.

Clay is trying to find the owner of a cemetery he believes may have once belonged to a church, either Central or Center Primitive Baptist , to get permission to find and clean it up.

He became interested in cemeteries while hunting for information about his own family.

“My mother calls me morbid,” he said.

“But then again, when I go out to looking for one of the family cemeteries and find someone who’s related, she wants to know about it.”

Clay takes photos of gravestones and has posted more than 5,000  on findagrave.com  in addition to his work cleaning up cemeteries.

“It helps us with the history of those who were here before because a lot of the stones have a lot of useful information,” Clay said. “It’s also green space. You can go out there, sit and relax, watch the birds, squirrels. It’s more or less park space.”

Clark called the work a Scout’s “debt to our community.”

People interested in helping out have called Clay from McLeansville and from Randolph County. Someone from Mecklenburg County sought him out for ideas on getting started cleaning up a forgotten cemetery there.

“I’m hoping by me doing it up here, somebody somewhere else will take care of a cemetery that belongs in our family that we don’t know about,” Clay said.

Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com