Last Reunion: Descendants visit ancient cemetery at USACE center

Three headstones stand in a small cemetery at the Humphreys Engineer Center (HEC). They date back to the mid-1800s, but HEC maintains them in pristine condition. That care paid off Sept. 21, 2017, when descendants of those buried there visited the cemetery. Katherine (Triplett) Nuss, her husband Gary Nuss, and daughter Janet Nuss were visiting to learn more about William W. Triplett, Katherine's grandfather six times removed.

The Nuss family is from Colorado near Denver. Plans for the visit began when Katherine Nuss contacted her congressman, Rep. Ken Bucks, to arrange a visit to the cemetery on the HEC campus near Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Bucks' office contacted the Office of Congressional Affairs at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Headquarters in Washington, D.C., who in turn contacted Dale Stoutenburgh, Director of the Humphreys Engineer Center Support Activity (HECSA).

"When it came to me I said, 'Oh, certainly. I know exactly what you're talking about and we'll be glad to receive them,'" said Stoutenburgh, the unofficial "mayor" of the Humphreys Engineer Center. "I gave the Office of Congressional Affairs my name as the point of contact, and it wasn't long before I received an e-mail from Ms. Nuss."

Stoutenburgh and Dr. John Lonnquest, Chief of the Office of History, met the Nuss family at the cemetery when a security guard escorted them from the front gate. The headstones are for Lieutenant William Triplett (1730-1803), William M. Triplett (1815-1858), and Mary A. Triplett (1810-1815). They are clustered on a knoll overlooking the Kingman Building.

"That was common for family cemeteries back then," Lonnquest told the Nuss family. "They placed their cemeteries on land where they couldn't plant anything."

The little cemetery is the last trace of a prominent early Virginia family. No other ruins or artifacts have been discovered on HEC's property.

"This began when my father had Alzheimer's," Katherine Nuss said. "He kept saying that he wanted to go home. We thought he meant home to North Carolina, where most of our people are from. But he said no, home to Virginia. That led me to research our family history, and we learned that our people were originally from Virginia."

The William & Mary Historical Society lists the Tripletts as one of the first families of Virginia, living in the state since the 1600s when King George of England awarded land to a Triplett ancestor.

William Triplett purchased about 500 acres where HEC now stands sometime between 1767 and 1777. The Triplett family were neighbors of George Washington, and Nuss said that family records indicate the Tripletts visited Mount Vernon often and went foxhunting with Washington and his brothers.

The Triplett family were stonemasons by trade and, after visiting the cemetery, the Nuss family went to Mount Vernon to see an addition that the Tripletts built for Washington's kitchen.

The Triplett Farm, also called Round Hill Plantation, remained in the Triplett family until the U.S. government obtained the land on May 5, 1941. According to Stoutenburgh, at one time USACE operated the Coastal Engineering Research Center at the site. When USACE wanted to expand, Fort Belvoir transferred 583 acres on their North Post to USACE on Oct. 3, 1980. HECSA (Kingman Building), the Army Geospatial Center (Cude Building), and the Institute for Water Resources (Casey Building) now occupy the site.

The cemetery is protected under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, but Stoutenburgh said that HEC would likely maintain the cemetery in any case because "it's right across the street on the knoll, and people drive by it every day. We wouldn't want it looking bad, and it's not a large plot of land, so our groundskeepers cut the grass, clear out the weeds, and pick up the leaves and branches."

"We're very pleased to see that the Humphreys Engineer Center is taking such good care of our family's graves," Gary Nuss said.