As an impressionable young boy, George Washington Carver watched friends and neighbors being buried in the Moses Carver Family Cemetery. The cemetery may contain as many as 40 graves dating back to 1835, but only 21 graves have inscribed markers today. Some unidentified graves were uncovered during an archeological investigation near the south wall of the cemetery in 1985, but the locations of other grave sites remain unknown. Moses Carver kept ownership of the graveyard throughout his life, and burials could take place only with his permission. The east-west orientation of the graves suggests that the Carvers held traditional views of the afterlife, placing bodies with their feet to the east so they would face the direction from which Christ's second coming was expected. The original entrance stood near the center of the east wall, and the pattern of grave clusters suggests close family ties among those buried within each group.