On the brick walkway that meanders through First Presbyterian Church of York's churchyard — the burial place of nearly 200 people, many of whom helped form the country during the Revolutionary War — water began settling.
The issue was enough for the church to enlist a volunteer grounds worker to begin digging up the path. Last Sunday, bricks were peeled away. On Monday morning, the work continued.
That's when Cindy Lobach, the church's archivist since 2010 and a longtime member, got an email from her grounds crew.
"We found something interesting, come down here," Lobach recalled the email saying.
Amid the brick work, a 222-year-old tombstone was unearthed and uncovered. The etchings on the granite slab are clear: "In memory of Mrs. Elizabeth Kelly who died 6th of Sept. 1793."
"They didn't want to touch it," Lobach said. "We were very carefully digging."
By Wednesday, Lobach said, the East Market Street church had removed the tombstone from the ground and laid it against a wall outside the church. A 2-foot chunk of the tombstone was missing off the bottom. The slab was cleaned and for the most part is in "remarkably good shape," Lobach said.
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There are plans to get a foundation and place Elizabeth Smith Kelly's tombstone where it belongs — among a plot of burial markers for her father, Colonel James Smith, a known signer of the Declaration of Independence, and his wife Eleanor Armor Smith.
Elizabeth was the wife of James Kelly, a lawyer in York, Lobach said. She died in 1793 at 28 years old.
James Kelly remarried to her sister Mary, although he waited about seven years. A monument to the couple stands in the churchyard near where Elizabeth's tombstone was uncovered.
For Lobach, the unlikely discovery was especially surprising.
In 2012, she published a roughly 400-page book telling the stories of the 178 people buried in the church's cemetery. With Elizabeth, the total stands at 179. Lobach plans to add an addendum about Elizabeth to her book.
Elizabeth's tombstone is the second oldest there, Lobach said. She's not sure exactly how much it weighs, but said the tombstone is about 4-feet by 2-feet and about 3 inches thick.
Elizabeth died "after a tedious and painful illness, which was supported with equal fortitude and resignation from the first symptoms of approaching dissolution to the last sad moment which was to separate the earthly tabernacle from that pure celestial spirit about to take its flight to the blissful mansions of eternity," according to her obituary, which was released by the church.
The oldest tombstone belongs to David Grier, who died in 1790. Grier was a compatriot of Colonel Smith's and severely wounded in the Paoli Massacre in 1777. He died at 49 of injuries from the war, Lobach said.
There are other prominent York Countians who have tombstones at the church including Charles Barnitz, a York lawyer who hosted celebrities like Davey Crockett and Jacob Emmitt in his home.
Emmitt was a shoemaker in York who is known for hiding his shoes in a coffin at a funeral home when the Confederates invaded the city and were looking to steal them for their soldiers, Lobach said.
The church, which recently celebrated its 250th anniversary, said Elizabeth's tombstone could have been there since 1793.
"Back in the day, people didn't have the same amount of respect for tombstones," she said, adding that tombstones were sometimes used as "filler" when something new was being constructed like a walkway.
That also means it's unclear if Elizabeth's body was buried there.
"For many years, people moved tombstones all the time...and when they did that, they didn't move the bodies, they just moved the stones," she said.
For now, the church will need to finish fixing up the brick walkway. Could there be other tombstones that have gone undiscovered at First Presbyterian?
"I can always hope," Lobach said.
She continued, "It is judicious to save the tombstone to honor that person. The Smith family has no living relatives but they're certainly famous. Had the walkway not been repaired, it could have been another 100 or 200 years until it was uncovered. You wonder what else could be under there."
But, she said, "you can't go digging up the whole place."
The discovery of Elizabeth Smith Kelly's tombstone reminds some of other historic treasures that are still lost.
One example is a missing tombstone with an epitaph in memory of James Smith, Kelly's father and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Cindy Lobach has been searching for the missing stone slab — one that was seen in Smith's house on South George Street before the structure was demolished — for a few years. The tombstone is separate from the one that marks the colonel's grave, located on the grounds of First Presbyterian Church, Lobach said.
She's still on the hunt, she said.
Lobach, co-author of the church's 250th history book, was doing research for the project when she first came across information about the lost item: a flat tombstone was found in the basement of the home.
"They found it, but no one knows what happened to it," she said. "As far as I know, there is no update on that."
