Aug 062009
(July 26, con’t.) My first stop, after getting some breakfast, was at the Oak Grove cemetery. It was my 3rd stop at that cemetery this year.
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1st trip in May – I looked for William McCarty’s grave. McCarty is the person who interceded in the dispute between James Tompkins and some Potawatomi women over apple trees in 1831. (See “William McCarty’s Language Skills.”) I spent a long time looking, but didn’t find McCarty’s grave. Found some of his in-laws, but not McCarty himself. Visited in a house his son had built, but hadn’t found McCarty’s grave near there, either.
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2nd trip in June (not by bicycle) – I found information in the Coldwater library that led me to the grave. It was right at the entrance to the cemetery, on the highest ground. But somehow I neglected to take a photo of the face of the tombstone that had McCarty’s name. I took photos of everything but that, it seemed. (The tombstone itself is the obelisk-like structure in the left foreground.)
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3rd trip on July 26. Finally got that photo.
The first stop of the day shown here.
And here is his name on the tombstone.
[...] Spokesrider, combines cycling and historical research. He recently posted about searching for the tombstone of a farmer who knew enough of a local Indian dialect to intervene in a dispute over apple trees in [...]
John,
Your piece sent me off searching for pictures of some tombstones my wife and I found in the Santa Fe National Cemetery while we were looking for her father and uncle.
That search led me to some other pictures that uncovered an even more fascinating mystery.
Thanks for jogging my memory.