If Joe Fehrer hadn’t stumbled across the grave site, it might never have been found.

Flanked by an encroaching marsh, it sits a half mile walk from the nearest road through water that threatens to flow over the tops of mud boots.

On a sunny Friday morning on the way to the site in the Robinson Neck preserve on Taylors Island, Fehrer tests the water depth with a well-worn staff.

"This channel is too deep to cross," he says, looping back to chart a new course.

His mission for the day was to measure and record information about a group of historic graves located inside the Nature Conservancy's preserve in Dorchester County, Maryland.

Dating predominantly from the early 19th century, a cluster of family gravestones peaks out of the wooded ground at the edge of the marsh.

Some are sunken but some still stand tall after a couple hundred years.

All are facing a fate that is predicted to become commonplace over the next few centuries on the Eastern Shore.

"Like everything else in Dorchester County, it's wet and getting wetter," said Fehrer, who works as the lower Eastern Shore project manager for the Nature Conservancy.

The county has been identified as one of the "ground zero" sites for the impacts of climate change in the United States.

Within the next hundred years, the stones will likely be underwater. There are dozens of other grave sites in the county that could be similarly impacted.

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Historic grave site's path to recognition

The family grave site can't be found on any public maps.

"I just stumbled on it, probably 12 years ago when I was walking the preserve," said Fehrer. "I saw the headstones but I didn't have a GPS."

Last year he relocated the site.

His goal is to get it added to the inventory of historic places through the Maryland Historic Trust. He embarked on the process of filling out the required documentation.

"This is one of many sites across the Eastern Shore that run the risk of being lost," said Fehrer. "Before that happens sites like this just need to be documented, because this is part of the history of Dorchester County."

The site includes only a handful of graves, almost all with the last name of Robson.

Fehrer believes Robson is a precursor to the name Robinson, which the area "Robinson Neck" is named after.

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His research has shown him that after settling in the area, the Robsons packed up in the mid-19th century and moved west. Nearby is a historic home, which he suspects was their family farm.

One of the family's ancestors was a captain in the Revolutionary War, he said.

With a lifelong interest in Eastern Shore history, Fehrer wanted to make sure all the information at the site was preserved.

"It's just the right thing to do," he said.

Grave sites threatened across the Eastern Shore

Maps from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that with 1 foot of sea level rise, portions of the Robson grave site area will be under low water.

If the sea level rises 2 feet, the entire site will be flooded with low to medium water levels.

That scenario is not far off, according to the latest predictions from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

The report, released in late 2018, show an expected rise of .8 to 1.6 feet across Maryland by 2050.

In 2017, a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists said Maryland had the second-highest number of communities that will experience chronic inundation from flooding, only behind Louisiana.

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The area has a long shoreline and many low-lying areas. The Eastern Shore is also sinking.

Thousands of years ago, ice sheets pushed down the land in New England, causing the the Mid-Atlantic region to bubble up.

Now that the ice has melted, the process is very slowly reversing, causing the Mid-Atlantic to sink relative to sea level.

In Dorchester County, grave sites along the water's edge could start to disappear. Cemeteries on some water-logged Chesapeake Bay islands have already been engulfed.

"This is not an outlier, this is going to be one of many places," Fehrer said.

Recent Salisbury University graduate Ashley Samonisky began charting these places as part of her geographic information system degree.

She mapped over 100 grave sites and cemeteries in Dorchester County and overlaid their GPS points with sea level rise data from the Eastern Shore Regional GIS Cooperative.

Her model shows almost 30 sites in lower Dorchester County that will be underwater due to sea level rise in 2050.

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Samonisky said she added the component of mapping sea level rise in her project after wading through mud to many of sites.

"I learned that our history it is not just important to us, we were one of the earliest colonized areas in the country," Samonisky said. "There aren’t many states that can say that we were here at the beginning."

Should grave sites be moved?

Up and down the coast as historical sites are threatened by sea level rise and flooding, historians and researchers grapple with how to address the issue.

The first step at the Robson family site is to make an official record.

But Fehrer said he isn’t sure what should come next.

Some threatened cemeteries have opted to build a sea wall to try to stop the flow of water.

At this remote site, that's not much of an option.

Some try to move the stones to a higher location.

But that may not work either; the stones would be difficult to move because of the remote location.

Even if they could be moved, he’s not sure they should be.

"There is no history attached to the movement of the stone from here to somewhere higher, that is my personal opinion,” Fehrer said.

Even if nothing else is done, he thinks it is important to have a record that the site was there.

"There is a lot of history here that if it is not documented, it falls away," said Fehrer. "I guess this is just my way of making sure that this particular place isn't forgotten."

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