Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 January 1896 — Carved in the Bark. [ARTICLE]

Carved in the Bark.

“I don't quite understand, and I never could," said an observer, “what prompts people to write their names in public places. Trees have always been favorite objects upon which to carve names, aud the smooth bark of the beech offers a field most inviting to tbe knife of the carver. 1 suw owe a bunch of beech trees upon which thousands of names had been cut. This was in Virginia, close by the left bank of the James River. A ravine nuuie back from the river, and at the head of this ravine there was a spring. Around the spring was this clump of beech trees. "The names carved on these trees were those of soldiers who had been encamped thereabouts in the time of the Civil War, and who bad come to this spring for water. It was in 1879 that I saw them, so that they must have been there then at least fourteen years; they had probably been there longer. About a third of the names were still legible; many of them were the names of men of Pennsylvania regiments; those that had become illegible were mainly those that uad been carved on smaller trees. “There was one big tree that had upon It, I should think, 500 names. They encircled It for twenty feet up from the ground. It seemed as if some of those among the highest must have been cut by men who swung down from the first branch, and one could imagine that men stood on one another's shoulders to reach above the names already carved by men standing on the ground, or that perhaps there was led up beside the tree a horse upon whose back the carver stood. “These names may have been carved, every one of them, simply as a pastime, aud yet it seemed somehow as though this was a case in which the curving might have been done in something more than a merely idle spirit.”