FORGOTTEN GRAVES
During the seven years I lived in my present home, I have sat on the front porch and looked across the Susquehanna river to a bluff just beyond the P. & E. Railroad. White tombstones, looming up above the weeds, like the great white teeth of Death, indicated that human bodies had been laid there to rest, while the struggle with others continued for a little while longer. Mrs. Haiden often spoke of going over to visit the spot. To her an old graveyard appeals with stronger force than the most beautiful garden of flowers. Three years ago, when we visited Washington, the wise old faces of the Senators and Representatives of the people did not appeal to her. Neither did the political stench of the Capitol. Arlington cemetery and the Egyptian mummies in the National Museum took her fancy. They were flowers handed down to us from a former generation, as they say in the Declaration of Independence.
Well, Mrs. Haiden’s curiosity to visit the old Quiggle cemetery overcame my laziness, and one fine Sunday we persuaded Professor Stevenson to accompany us, and we crossed the river at the ferry and walked through the fields to the place of interest. The cemetery is quite an old burial ground for this neighborhood. We could not determine how old, because the first graves made there were marked only with mountain sand stones, and only a few of them bore an inscription.
One of the graves was marked with a granite monument and surrounded with an iron fence, and inside the enclosure was an iron bench, just as though some loved one left behind would often come there and sit in the solitude and commune with the dead man under the sod. It was a beautiful and tender suggestion, and if the dead could really send back a message to the waiting ones, how much of death’s mystery could be cleared away. But aching hearts and the longings of yearning souls have failed to bring back even a whispered message from the land beyond the shadow line. The dead cannot talk to us any more than the living can talk to the dead. The wires are all down between the living and the dead—all down and out of use, and when we sit at the graves of our loved ones, all we can do is to recall the past; if time is a circle, then heaven lies in the past, as well as in the future, and the needle of our mental compass always points into the great beyond, no difference where we look.
On one mountain stone we found the figures 1803, and the name, Andrew K. Rinder. He had been buried one hundred and seven years—before the war of 1812 was fought between our country and Great Britain. The roar of the cannons could not disturb his rest. The big trains on the “Pennsy” go thundering by only two hundred feet away, but Rinder does not hear them. He never saw a steam locomotive nor a railroad track. These modern inventions have crowded in upon his resting place, but he is done with the world—he does not care. He lived his little life and lies in his little grave on this lonely little hill. Perhaps we will be as thoroughly forgotten in a century from now as Andrew K. Rinder. It has been over a hundred years since that name was set up in printed letters—perhaps it will never appear again. Did some mysterious force lead me there to resurrect that long forgotten name? Who can say? Life is a plan and a purpose; we move as the wheels in a clock, urged by a power to which we are attached by unseen hands.
On our return, we ran across a private burial ground we had known nothing about. Here lie the two generations of Stech’s. John Stech was buried in 1815. His sons and daughters lie sleeping at his side. The sons never married, and the name of Stech died out of the neighborhood. Not a man bearing that good old German name is known in this county. The valuable farm has fallen into the hands of strangers, and the private burial place is overgrown with briars and trees, and the top of the marker fallen to the ground. Nobody cares. These two bachelor brothers should have married and left some one to carry their name and to care for their graves.
I do not advocate Rooseveltian families—the age for large families has passed away—but I do believe every sane man should have a life behind in place of the one he takes away when he steps out. These forgotten and neglected graves in the Stech burial ground show that the Stechs neglected their duty during life. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” is true in all phases of earthly existence.
In less than a century ninety-nine per cent of the world’s dead are forgotten on earth. We, too, will be forgotten. Is there a record kept elsewhere? Are there more durable tablets than these rough mountain stones and granite?