In the spring, 120-year-old peonies will bloom again, thanks to Ann Garvey.

The fragrant flowers, originally grown at an Oella Avenue home by Garvey’s great-grandmother, will blossom in the Oella Cemetery on Catonsville’s west side.

The herbaceous plants will decorate the graves of four of Garvey’s ancestors — her great-grandmother’s sons and daughters who died as infants and children around the turn of the 20th century.

“They passed the peonies down through the generations,” Garvey said. “My mother would dig them up and say, ‘These are my grandmother’s. I’m not leaving them here,’ and would take them. I brought them back, and they’re pink, and now those peonies are with [my great-grandmother’s] babies again.”

Garvey is one of several dedicated volunteers with the Oella Historical Society and Patapsco Heritage Greenway, two nonprofit groups working to restore a centuries-old hillside burial ground — Oella Cemetery, the only known cemetery once run by a company for its employees in Maryland.

The overgrown graveyard in the woods between Oella and Rest avenues is home to at least 500 tombstones — some standing, most toppled — and an untold number of graves for workers at Oella mill and their families.

The Union Manufacturing Company established both the mill and a company town in 1809 in response to an embargo on imported textiles in the lead-up to the War of 1812. Powered by the Patapsco River, the mill produced cotton textiles. Shortly after the mill’s founding, the company set aside land for the cemetery. However, the cemetery was not associated with a church and a long-term maintenance plan was never established.

The mill weaved woolen textiles for menswear until 1972, when it shut down.

As a genealogist and history buff, Garvey believes it’s vital to maintain the Oella Cemetery.

“I just feel it’s important historically, especially within families, to pass the knowledge of your family down through generations,” she said.

Who lived in Oella?

Downhill, near the edge of the graveyard, a moss-pocketed tombstone bearing the name “Henry Binnix” marks the final resting place of one of hundreds of 19th and 20th century mill workers.

Binnix, a “beloved husband” and father, died Nov. 26, 1900, back when it cost around $2 to bury an adult in the Oella Cemetery and $1 for a child, Garvey said.

According to ledgers preserved by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County archive, many families could only pay the dollar it cost to bury their child in monthly 25-cent installments.

“That’s how poor they were, really,” Garvey said.

Many of the mill’s employees and their families were Scots-Irish immigrants drawn to the textile mill village tucked along the steep, wooded hills and hollers of the Patapsco Valley across the river from Ellicott City.

While the cemetery marks how commonplace it was for people of all ages to die in fires and from disease, it’s also home to War of 1812 veterans and those born before the Revolutionary War.

“I guarantee we are going to find a Revolutionary War [veteran] in here,” Garvey said. “I guarantee it. Stands to reason.”

Preserving history

During a cleanup last weekend, Julia Graham pointed her trekking pole toward the mill village beyond the steep slope of the cemetery.

“Until I moved here, I was never interested in history,” she said. “Living in Oella personalized it. Thinking what were people’s lives like just fascinated me.”

Graham, who lives in a renovated former mill home, was so taken with the village that she helped revive the Oella Historical Society and became its president.

Over the past three years, the society and the Patapsco Heritage Greenway have been organizing cleanups to clear decades of fallen trees, sticker bushes and wildly overgrown Japanese stiltgrass — an invasive species in North America.

Graham explained that the society raised $16,000 to hire a professional to plot every headstone and catalog every name using GPS surveying.

“Three years ago,” Graham said at the foot of the hillside, “we wouldn’t have been able to get down here.”

While the long-term preservation of the site — from restoring weathered stones to maintaining and controlling vegetation — is far from resolved, Kyla Cools remains optimistic.

The heritage program manager at Patapsco Heritage Greenway, Cools, who has a doctorate in archaeology, said restoration projects like Oella Cemetery bring communities together.

“Cemeteries are a huge opportunity for both emotional restoration but also community bonding,” Cools said. “This is a space where we see neighbors meeting each other for the first time when they come out to volunteer ... bonding over the fact that they have shared family members resting here.”

It’s also the kind of endeavor, Cools said, that brings together people who are good at genealogical research as well as those with a background in landscaping and environmental science.

“You know we’re all going to pass one day, and I certainly hope that ... the community I am resting in puts in an effort to maintain and honor those resting in the space,” she said. “I think we all want that for our loved ones.”

Want to learn more about Oella Cemetery? The Friends of Oella Cemetery, with Patapsco Heritage Greenway, will share the cemetery’s history, environmental challenges and current successes, and explain how the community can help, at 7:15 p.m. Wednesday, after a brief Greater Oella Community Association meeting at the Westchester Community Center, 2414 Westchester Ave., Catonsville.