Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 December 1892 — Family Graveyards. [ARTICLE]

Family Graveyards.

“There is no place like Southern Indiana for graveyards,” said William Yakey, of Bloomfield, Iml., to a Chicago Globe reporter. “Now, that section, including Green, Monroe. Brown and Sullivan counties, is a wonderland to traverse. It looks as though the old settlers of fifty yearn ago wanted each one to have a graveyard of his own. Every mile or two, often far from nny roadway, totally inaccessible to wagons without laying waste the fences, you come upon little rock-walled or railbound inclosurcß containing the dead of one family. Father, mother and several children lie there, and none others. “ These places have long been forsaken and forgotten. Weeds flourish in profusion and hide the wind and rain-stained tombstones from view. Often with a companion I have entered one of these little inclosures, trampled and torn out the weeds and righted the five or six headstones that had fallen and buried even the inscribed virtues of the dead into the wormy earth. “These people had no country churohyard; no preacher except the visiting parson, who came monthly on horseback. They had no funeral in the present sense of the word. Plain wooden boxes were used for coffins, and often the sturdy youth of the family made the coffin for the dead parent or relative. Those little spots were dear to those families. One can sec that by the loving little inscriptions and decorations. When they were all dead no one remained to care for them, and they fell into decay and ruin. “They are lonesome sights, those little groups of white pillars. In the winter, when the trees are bare and the grass dead, I have seen flocks of crows coming and circling about the clump of trees that usually cluster about those places. The bitter wind moans through the crackling branches, and those crows wheel about and caw and croak until the world seems truly a place of sorrow and death.”