Cemetery Visit

Every Memorial Day weekend I drive the two hours from Tiffin to Rockford. I drove my mother on this trip several times after my dad died, and then I just kept it up after she couldn’t make it any longer. Lately I’ve been taking my wife along, though our trip interrupts the long holiday weekend. She’s a good sport, and it’s nice to have the company.

We travel first to Riverside Cemetery, where I put out two pots of flowers at the grave of my grandparents, who are buried in a newer section, away from the large oak trees shading the older graves.

There is always wind out here on the flatlands, so we have to jam straightened coat hangers into the pots to keep them from being blown over. Unless it’s raining—which happens from time to time—the ground will be baked into rock. I kneel on the prickly already-dried grass before the headstone and struggle with the wire, bending it straight and then feeling for it at the bottom of the pot. It’d take a miracle to get it through the hole in the bottom on the first try, so it takes a while to work it through. Once one end is through, I have to bend the other end down and through. And then I have to force the blunt ends of the wire down through the gravel in front of the gravestone. It’s never easy. The wire bends. It refuses to push through the rocks and the ground. But I always get it finally.

After finishing up and watering the pots with the gallon milk jugs of water we’ve brought along, my wife and I move over to the older section of the cemetery. There, scattered across the lawn in clumps of familial relevance are my extended family. My grandfather's siblings, including Mary and Carl, are there, as are their parents, Ferdellus and Mina. Nearby is the rather imposing headstone of William Kimmel, brother of Absalom and Jacob and my great-great grandfather. He is buried, conventionally enough, beside his wife, Lydia. There's no sign I can find of his second wife, Ida Alsbaugh, with whom he evidently lived out of wedlock for years following his move to town from the family farm along Township Line Road, much to the dismay of his relatives who into the current century made oblique references to “that woman.”

Along the western edge of the cemetery cluster together the headstones of a group of the Kimmel sisters: Mary Ellen Felver, Anna McKay, Alice Tester, and Jennie Atkinson. Off by himself and closer to my grandparents stands the memorial for the youngest Kimmel sibling, Peck.

Then we drive out into the countryside to our second stop, the Fountain Chapel Cemetery in Blackcreek Township. Along the way we pass the land the Kimmels bought on Township Line Road after the lynchings. The house William built later that century is much different from when they lived there, but it’s still recognizable as the same structure I’ve seen in old pictures. The original log cabin my great uncle Carl remembered exploring as a child is long gone from its spot behind the frame house. We flash by the house and turn right onto Purdy Road, just at the corner where William owned sixty acres. There’s no sign of any dwelling on that corner any longer, just unbroken fields.

Just before we reach Erastus-Durbin Road, we pull into the grass at the small cemetery across Purdy from the field where the Methodist Episcopal church stood. A huge tree hugs an iron fence just off the road, but the cemetery’s other three sides are bordered by open fields. This is a cemetery that is mowed but otherwise untended, and there are many, many missing headstones. Others have fallen and lie in the grass or lean drunkenly against one another or their more sober brethren. Henry’s stone stands somewhat alone in its row, with plenty of room around it for Susan, who notably lacks a stone. Henry’s is limestone, and like all of the stones of the same make and vintage, acid rain has wiped away nearly all of the writing from its surface. The stone is so pitted that it’s impossible to even take a rubbing of the markings—I know, I’ve tried and failed. We look over the gravestone and don’t leave any flowers, but we make a promise to bring more next year. It’s the same promise every year.

Back into the car, we drive south along Erastus-Durban Road, reversing the route the Kimmels would have taken when they moved north from their original homestead after the lynchings. We pass through their land, though there’s no way of knowing there was ever a house here without a plot map. It’s odd to think that this flat expanse of corn and soybeans once contained trees and houses and barns. We turn left onto Tama Road. It’s always surprising how far each of these steps is, as it all looks so close together on a county map.

We pull into the gravel parking space along the north side of Tama. The church that stood beside the graves when I first began to come here is gone now, burned down and bulldozed under. It’s beans this year. The cemetery is fairly typical for these country church sites. The township mows between the headstones, but there’s little other upkeep. The monuments tilt this way and that as the ground beneath them settles, leaning over more and more with each passing year until the moment, maybe during the night, maybe during a hard, driving rainstorm one afternoon, the stones pass the tipping point and fall unheard into the soft grass.

Mary Secaur’s gravestone stands alone and weathered in the northwestern corner of the old Liberty Chapel Cemetery in Mercer County. The plastic flower pots we left with Mary last Memorial Day weekend greet us, plants long dried to sticks, plastic cracked from the sun and heat and cold of the time that has passed. Though woods would have blocked the view in 1872, now her headstone looks out over the just-growing fields of beans at the empty space where the Kimmel homestead once stood.

The gravestone of Mary’s brother Elias stands off to her right, leaning daringly. The gaps between the headstones and between Mary’s and the next stones to her left provide plenty of space for the graves of other family members, including her mother.

Scattered around Mary are the markers for her neighbors and family, including her grandfather and Henry Hinton, who both figure in my book.

Mary’s marker is the only one in this area that isn’t leaning or fallen over. Something is burrowing beneath them and tipping them over. It’s probably only a matter of time until this happens to Mary’s. The limestone has weathered to the point that just Mary’s name and basic facts are visible. Acidic rain has burned away the rest of the wording. At the top of the stone is a rusted stub where an ornament—an angel? a lamb?—has fallen away.

Update: On our visit to the cemetery in May 2018, most of the headstones had been restored. If anyone knows who was responsible, please tell me because I'd love to make a donation.

We leave the cemetery, and I drive my wife along the path of Mary’s last walk as slowly as the country traffic will permit. There are farmers getting in their late-spring plowing and planting and fertilizing even over this holiday weekend, and I doubt they’d be sympathetic to my desire to retrace the steps of a long-dead girl. The land here is hammered smooth, flatter than any place I’ve ever been, save the ocean. From the cemetery the stand of trees across Tama Road from the murder site is visible—two and a half miles away—as a small green smudge on the horizon. In Mary’s time, there would have been more houses and trees along the route. Still, the view down the dusty road would have been much like what we see slowly unrolling before us. Farmhouses, visible over a mile away, crawl up to us. As we pass by her grandfather Strouse May’s house—or at least a house on that plot of land—we can see a slight dip in the road up ahead, about half the distance to where the Sitterly house stood, where Mary would have disappeared from view. When we arrive at the Sitterly homesite, I realize the house itself has disappeared from view—burned down, bulldozed over and sown with soybeans within the past year. We stop the car and get out. There’s absolutely nothing here to hint at a dwelling, and the new field runs right up to the gravel along the edge of the road. Mary Secaur’s house has been erased. If we trample the sprouts and dig around in the dirt where I peeked into the windows last year, we might find scraps of charred wood, shards of glass. There may be a long-lost button or a forgotten coin once held in a young girl’s hand. But we get back into the car and leave the emptiness.

We drive north what my 1876 county map calls “St. Mary & Fort Wayne Road” and what during the Depression my grandfather worked with a road crew to transform into U.S. 33. We turn east and pass an amazing sight heading west on our side of the road: a young man walking barefoot alongside a donkey laden with a pile of possessions, adorned with an American flag, and labeled with a large handwritten sign. My wife and I look at each other, and I immediately turn the car around and head back to the intersection, where we pull off the tarmac to wait for him. He’s a friendly young man, and more than willing to take a break and get some water from us for his dog and his donkey. He tells us he’s just set out to walk barefoot from Rockford to Seattle, hoping to catch the attention of Bill Gates, whom he feels should be doing something to fund college education in America. He’s a delightful young man in his early twenties. He waves to friends who honk as they pass us on the busy highway. He’s enthusiastic and gung-ho for his mission. However, he’s only walked a few miles, and his bare feet are already sore. It seems unlikely that he’ll make it all the way to Seattle, and we’re both amazed at his charming lunacy. Still, why not? We talk with him about his mission, and I tell him that my family is from the area. It turns out he knew my great uncle Ed. We leave him on his journey and laugh as we head back to town and slurp shakes at Tastee Twirl. When we get home, we look up his website, complete with “donkeycam.” Mapquest tells us the distance from Rockford to Seattle is 2,275 miles. It would take nearly a day and a half to drive straight through.

In a way, his dream of walking to meet Bill Gates, mad though it may be, is not that different from my attempts to recapture the truth of a murder case that reaches back four generations. And Seattle is not going anyplace. My target has not only walked around the corner out of earshot, but any evidence of it is fast disappearing. The buildings are torn down, leaving us with no eyewitnesses to the events. Even the trees have been torn down, replaced by others or by open fields. The people, naturally, are no more.

Remember, please, that these excerpts are covered by copyright and may not be distributed or reproduced in any manner without my express written consent. Feel free to contact me via email (dkimmel at heidelberg dot edu) if you have any questions!

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