Indian Graves.
The above sounds fishy, but it was the actual experience of Conductor Pat Connolly. But a stranger thing happened than the washing up of the negro graveyard, and one which is greatly interesting the Tennessee Historical Society. At a little station a few miles below Pulaski, in Giles County, there is a very rich field which old men know has been cultivated for seventy-five years. Nor was the water ever known to rise over it before. Before it was known to the ploughshare, it was a great forest, covered with trees of great age, many of them there when De Soto’s Spaniards marched through in the sixteenth century. Last month I went down into that county to hunt squirrels, and as we rested in the woods, turned into bouquets by blooming dogwood and red-buds, to eat our noon lunch by a big, cool spring, Mr. Bob Brannon, of Lynnville, who was in our party of hunters, told me this incident.
“When the waters subsided over this field,” said Mr. Brannon, “the current at one place had taken off two feet or more of soil, and there fully exposed as if laid bare by hand, was a burial ground of some ancient people. The tombs had been nicely built of slabs of rocks, enclosing the body, of which a number were found, some of them as perfect skeletons as I ever saw. Infants lay side by side with father and mother and how long they had slept there only the Great Father knows, for not a descendant of this ancient race now lives on the earth, every vestige of its cultivation has passed away and forest trees, centuries old, have grown over their graves, which might have slumbered on till eternity but for the flood. I handled the skulls and bones, but I felt as if I was touching sacred things, relics of civilization older than any we know of.”