Meet the Egglestons

These people lived in our house once. I believe they built it (though I could be making that up). They were farmers. The headstones, legible when I was a kid, are now dissolving in the acid rain we receive courtesy of coal-fired power plants in the midwest, so they're not as easy to read now. Patriarch James died in 1819 at the age of 82 and if the stone that's there now is the original, it took his family 43 years to save up for it. Sabra died in 1856 -- she's on James' headstone, which usually signals "wife" -- either she was a sister or a daughter, or I read the dates wrong. (They're barely discernable.) Or maybe James robbed the cradle! William Eggleston, James' son, married Deborah, and died 17 years later at the age of 44. Crushed by a tree, gored by an ox, stepped on a nail? Two of their sons died before he did. Willie H. was 14 when died in 1850; Freeman died 4 years earlier. He was only 6.

Deborah married Collins, William's brother or maybe a cousin. They put their daughter Jennie in the ground when she was just a year old, in 1861. Son Henry died in 1863 at the age of 5. Collins isn't here. Maybe he went to fight the Confederates and never came back. Or maybe when Deborah died in 1882, at the hard-won age of 67, he just had no more heart to fight this hardscrabble hillside farm. The last person to be buried here -- a least according to the headstones that still stand -- was Truman Doubleday in 1884, aged 4 years, 8 months.

The rocks these men pulled out of our stubborn glacial hills so they could grow crops are still piled in stone walls around the edges of what's now smooth meadow. Some of them were doubtless dug and rolled up to become part of the wall that surrounds this little graveyard. We still get apples from the trees they planted, though the deer get most of them. And the house they built still stands.