So far as anyone knows, no one is still buried behind Marine Corps Base Quantico’s Ammunition Supply Point, but there’s still the chance that workers expanding the facility in the next few years could come across human remains.

"There was a homestead there once, and that’s destroyed, but there is a cemetery there," said Kate Roberts, the base archaeologist, who is soliciting public comment on plans to make the cemetery off-limits as part of an expanded Ammo Supply Point.

"I just wanted people to have an opportunity to comment if they thought they had family members in that cemetery," she said.

After the federal government purchased what is now the west side of the base in 1942, bodies were exhumed from the cemetery’s 41 identifiable gravesites and, like most of the bodies found in cemeteries throughout the property, were reinterred at Cedar Run Cemetery.

Of the seven bodies identifiable by their markers, six were members of the Mountjoy family, which was established in
the Stafford area at least since the 1700s. The homestead, however, was built after William Mountjoy sold the property in the late 1800s.

Descendents of the family remain in the area, and one of them is the "other half" of Christina Dempsey, a firefighter with the base fire department. Her partner’s mother is a Mountjoy, whose father was born in a homestead where the Russell-Knox Building now stands, she said. The family didn’t know about the cemetery until she saw the Mountjoy store and cemetery marked on a map at work.

"To go out there and actually see where it all was and see how close it is to where I now work is pretty neat," Dempsey said.

However, she said no one in the family had concerns about the site becoming part of the Ammo Supply Point, especially since the bodies have been removed. "It is what it is," she said. "The government purchased it, and they preserved it as long as they could, but the base is growing, you know?"

It is largely the increase in traffic that came with that growth that has necessitated an expansion of the ASP, which sits just north of MCB-1.

"MCB-1 is a high-traffic area, and on that road for the last six, seven years, traffic has only increased," said Chief Warrant Officer Chuck Hollingsworth, officer in charge of the ASP.

He said when traffic hit more than 10,000 trips per day, the facility had to treat the road, which until recently passed through the ASP’s explosive arc, as it would treat a building.

Storage was reduced and rearranged so the explosive arc comes just up to, but does not cross, MCB-1, he said. "We actually had to reduce the amount of munitions we stored in the front eight magazines."

However, Hollingsworth said, with the facility using Magazine 2 as its point for receiving and issuing ammunition, that explosive arc expands again when shipments are made.

"Any time we get a tractor-trailer in with demo on it, we exceed our arc, and we don’t have a choice," he said.

The ASP is also listed as a safe haven for traveling munitions, in the event of a natural disaster, for example.

However, he said, it doesn’t have the proper facilities for that role, either.

The expansion is scheduled to begin
in 2015 and be completed in 2019, although Hollingsworth said the timeline will depend
on funding.

Five small, World War II-era magazines will be torn down, and six larger magazines will be built, along with a new building for receiving and issuing ammunition. There are 26 magazines at the ASP, but Hollingsworth said the new arrangement will not only move munitions away from the road but will also double the facility’s storage capacity.

"We’re doubling the net explosive weight limit, not necessarily the square footage," he said, noting that the limit will go from 529,000 pounds to 1.29 million pounds.

A new vehicle staging area will also allow a vehicle loaded with munitions to stay outside in a lot, and the facility will get an intrusion detection system equipped with closed-circuit television.

The cost estimate for the entire project is $13.5 million.

Nothing is to be built on top of the cemetery, although a new road would just miss it, but new fencing would make the site off-limits, Roberts said.

"There may be some graves outside the cemetery, but they’re not marked," she added.