Stephens Family Cemetery
Buried here are eight members of the Innis, Mazeen, and Stephens families, including the most famous of them all: Martha Stephens.
Local children knew Martha Stephens as "Granny." They also remembered her ever-present apron, the pipe often clenched in her teeth, and her matronly form. But Martha Stephens was no typical "Granny." At the time when women rarely owned property, she owned no fewer than seven tracts, including a 92-acre farm in Spotsylvania County. For a time, she ran a saloon in her home. A local resident remembered her as "uneducated [and] too free and outspoken in what she said and did and how she did it."
When she died in 1888 at the age of 68, the local paper called her a "genial spirit" and recalled wartime efforts to aid the wounded during the Battle of Fredericksburg. "Her ministrations will never be forgotten by those who survive," the paper noted, "and companions of those who died will ever cherish her memory."
Marker is on Sunken Road 0.1 miles north of Lafayette Boulevard (Virginia Highway 1), on the right when traveling north.
Courtesy hmdb.org
