SUSONG CEMETERY
Susong Cemetery in Bristol, Virginia, began on Christmas Day, 1818, with the burial of Margaret Baggs Susong, the forty-seven year old wife of Jacob Susong. Bristol old timers have told tales about how it was a "strange day", with alternating sunshine, snow showers, and thunder and lightning; many of the more superstitious professed grave concern about the "unusual manifestation of the elements".
The Susong family arrived in the area in 1794, on the day that General Evan Shelby was buried. They set up homestead on Baker's Creek, locating their "mansion house" about where Eckerd's Drug Store now stands in the Little Creek Shopping Mall. (The old homestead spring now forms pools of water near the main entry of the mall parking lot).
Jacob Susong had chosen a site on the ridge behind his home for a family cemetery, and that is where he buried his wife that strange Christmas Day. Other members of the family were later buried there, and it finally became a public cemetery.
