Leaving Hawkins Cemetery

(Sept 27, cont.) I took this photo just before taking my leave of the Hawkins Cemetery. The cemetery itself is in the upper right, overlooking Buckeye Creek below it. (Did the Hawkins family give it that name in honor of the state they had come from?)

The bridge and overhanging vegetation make a sort of portal through which one passes from one world to another, almost.

This view is looking back toward the Hawkins homestead and cemetery. It’s not far away, but it can’t be seen here because of that portal effect. One has to go down into the Buckeye Creek valley, then across the bridge-portal into the yard.

I rode on and visited two more cemeteries, but didn’t find Caroline Hawkins Clark’s grave.

However, this past weekend I was surprised to learn that she may have left some unpublished reminiscences in addition to those published in the 1897 collection of reminiscences. In a 1992 publication by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, of all places, she is quoted as having witnessed a mass baptism in the Mississinewa River not too many miles from this homestead. A small, little-known group of Mormons had settled there in the early 1830s. Caroline Hawkins’ name came up in this passage:

The Prophet Joseph headed north toward Winchester to visit the Saints and assure them that he was alive. The Bowen family lived on Arba Pike near Winchester at that time, and family tradition says that Joseph Smith visited the Bowen house. The only other written record of the Prophet’s visit in 1834 is found in the memoirs of E. Caroline Hawkins Clark, written when Caroline was eighty-eight years old. She wrote:

“When I was thirteen years old, I went to work away from home to get calico to make me a dress and a sun-bonnet. I worked for Burkett Pierce on the Mississinewa river near where Deerfield now is.

“While I was working there, Joe Smith, the first Mormon, came to Randolph county and raised a colony of converts in Wayne and Randolph counties. … And he baptized them in the Mississinewa, near Deerfield. I was there and saw the whole performance. He baptized them in the night by torch-light. They marched to the river with torches. Some carried horns to blow. They had torches on both banks of the river and some up in the trees.” (Excerpt from unpublished memoirs of E. Caroline Hawkins, quoted in “Mormons Led by Joseph Smith through City in May of 1834,” Winchester News-Gazette, 22 Sept. 1984.)

So now I need to find out which repository or family member has those reminiscences. If they were available to the Winchester newspaper in 1984, I presume they’re still around somewhere. Maybe there are some more bicycle destinations in them.

YTD mileage: 2070.5