Below one of the runways at an airport lie the graves of two people and there’s a very specific reason why they’ve never been moved.
As you approach the runway ready to jet off on a much-needed vacation, I bet you’ve never thought about what might lie beneath the tarmac.
Well, if you happen to find yourself at Georgia’s Savannah Hilton Head airport, you might spot two rectangular shapes side by side.
That’s because at the edge of runways 10 and 28, there are two graves holding the bodies of a couple who died in the 1800s.
Long before commercial airplanes, and therefore airports, were a thing, the land that is now the Savannah Hilton Head airport belonged to married couple, Catherine and Richard Dotson.
The couple, who were both born in 1797, were married for 50 years before Catherine passed away in 1877. Richard died seven years later in 1884.
As was custom at the time of their deaths, the husband and wife were buried next to each other on the land. The slab of land held around 100 graves in total, unfortunately including those of slaves.
Many of the graves were moved to Bonaventure Cemetery when the military needed the space to land its B-24 ‘Liberators’ and B-17 ‘Flying Fortresses’ during World War II.
But the grave sites for Catherine and Richard have remained in place for almost 150 years.
This is because their relatives wouldn’t consent to their graves being moved, believing that the couple would want to stay put on the land they had lived and worked on for their entire lives.
So, there was no choice but to have the area paved over their graves, so that a runway could be set up for the military to use.
They did, however, put markers on the graves as a sign of respect to those buried beneath the runway’s surface – the two rectangles that can be seen at the edge of the existing airport’s runways. And they aren’t the only graves left at the airport.
Just off to the side of the couple’s burial place next to the airport’s most active runway lie graves belonging to two of their beloved relatives, Daniel Hueston and John Dotson.
These grave sites are the only ones in the world embedded in an active runway, one which serves thousands of flights every year.
