"'I did really. I ran off the track. It was my first. I loved the woman dearly. She was a handsome girl; would have made a good, loving wife; was natural and quite intellectual, though not highly educated. I did honestly and truly love the girl, and think often, often, of her now.'"
A few weeks after the burial of Ann, McNamar returned to New Salem. He saw Lincoln at the post-office, and was struck with the deplorable change in his appearance. A short time afterwards Lincoln wrote him a deed, which he still has, and prizes highly, in memory of his great friend and rival. His father was at last dead; but he brought back with him his mother and her family. In December of the same year his mother died, and was buried in the same graveyard with Ann. During his absence, Col. Rutledge had occupied his farm, and there Ann died; but "the Rutledge farm" proper adjoined this one to the south. "Some of Mr. Lincoln's corners, as a surveyor, are still visible on lines traced by him on both farms."
On Sunday, the fourteenth day of October, 1866, William H. Herndon knocked at the door of John McNamar, at his residence, but a few feet distant from the spot where Ann Rutledge breathed her last. After some preliminaries not necessary to be related, Mr. Herndon says, "I asked him the question:—
"'Did you know Miss Rutledge? If so, where did she die?'
"He sat by his open window, looking westerly; and, pulling me closer to himself, looked through the window and said, 'There, by that,'—choking up with emotion, pointing his long forefinger, nervous and trembling, to the spot,—'there, by that currant-bush, she died. The old house in which she and her father died is gone.'
"After further conversation, leaving the sadness to momentarily pass away, I asked this additional question:—
"'Where was she buried?'
"'In Concord burying-ground, one mile south-east of this place.'"
Mr. Herndon sought the grave. "S. C. Berry," says he, "James Short (the gentleman who purchased in Mr. Lincoln's compass and chain in 1834, under an execution against Lincoln, or Lincoln & Berry, and gratuitously gave them back to Mr. Lincoln), James Miles, and myself were together.
"I asked Mr. Berry if he knew where Miss Rutledge was buried,—the place and exact surroundings. He replied, 'I do. The grave of Miss Rutledge lies just north of her brother's, David Rutledge, a young lawyer of great promise, who died in 1842, in his twenty-seventh year.'