Good Fences #20

Today I am linking with The Run Around The Ranch and Good Fences. When TexWiz first started this linky party, I wanted to go up into the mountains to this old grave yard. Which I have never done. My son and his friends were going to stay at a cabin over the weekend and I asked if when they were driving by he would take pictures of these fences for me. So he did.

 

The big gate it tied shut with hay string. That made me chuckle. There is that man gate next to the rock pillar.
My son kept talking about how quiet it was and all you could hear was the wind in the trees. When I was a little girl, we always stopped here on our way camping. My Mom was still alive then and she always came and visited like she was meeting old friends.

 

The grave markers are very old. At least you can still read some of them. It looks the same as it did when I was a child.

I was amazed at how huge this grave marker was. The boy standing next to it is over six feet.  It is still very ornate and  well kept.

Here is another shot of the gate, with the post over it that looks new. It wasn't there when I was a kid. I love it here in this area because of the oak trees and the rolling hills and the lovely people that live in the community. The kids that live up here still go to school in a one room school house. Kindergarten through eighth. In high school they would come down the mountain to go to high school at our local high school. The kids were always the smartest kids in the school and since I was different because of being raised in the country, I made great friends from this mountain community.

 

 Can you see down the hill the kids and the grave marker? That is a mass grave all the way down the hill from everyone else.
Down at the bottom of that marker is says " And others." I wanted to know why all of these people we put in a mass grave. During my research looking through these  old records what I found is that about 1877 there was a Diphtheria epidemic. There were communities up here that lost so many families other communities had to come in and bury them and this is what I think this is. One of the old documents said that the people were pulled very slowly down the mountain in a wagon pulled by horses. That was all I could figure out was that they were from someplace else. Maybe they were planning for more deaths. I don't know it didn't say.
 

It is one of the most heartbreaking things I have seen and how even today I was overcome the the sadness of it. But someone cared enough to list as many as they could.

 

In the spring it is all green and so pretty. You can tell how our lack of rain has even made it look so dry and brown. It really is a lovely place.
I want to thank my son for stopping and taking pictures and all of the young adults who were with him who were so happy to explore and to find that lonely grave.  I hope you enjoyed this little tour. Somewhere when I was doing my research are two gold miners who were murdered in the 1860s and the murderers were hanged at our courthouse in our town. There are lots of things in the records I was reading about this graveyard.

~Kim~

All his thinking could not make him understand,
but his singing heart could.
---Waterless Mountain, Laura Adams Armer, 1931