Southern Graves

Yes, that's a real line from a real obituary—a piece of 19th-century prose that didn't just report a death, but painted a vivid portrait of the deceased. The subject of the two obituaries transcribed below is George Walker III (1793-1865), son of the Revolutionary War soldier George Walker II (1763-1830) and his wife Betsey (1767-1835). George II settled in Pulaski County about the time of its formation in 1808. His home is said to have been built in a hilly section near the Twiggs County line. Sons of George built their homes on a three-and-a-half-mile stretch of the surrounding flatlands that became known as "Longstreet." George Walker III was a private in Tooke's Georgia Cavalry during the War of 1812. He and his wife, Martha Spann (1801-1866), were buried in the Walker family cemetery in Bleckley County, Georgia, which was carved out of Pulaski in 1912. Obituary I An interesting thing about this first obituary is that it actually lists the faults of Mr. George...

Imagine thirteen siblings, seven of whom were still underfoot, and a 23-year-old mother managing an impossible workload on top of earlier-than-expected summer heat. It was 1913 in New Madrid County, Missouri, and in the Lancaster household, the demands of survival often outpaced the resources available.  Sixteen-month-old Edith Irene, daughter of Cordelia Morrow and Charles Monroe Lancaster, died that June of a severe form of gastroenteritis, listed on her death certificate as illio colitis . In the early decades of the 20th century, diarrheal deaths in infants surged every summer. Anecdotal evidence suggests these deaths more often came during the "second summer" of a child's life, after breastfeeding was discontinued. Unpasteurized cow's milk and solid foods fit for an infant were difficult to keep fresh in the Missouri heat. Ileocolitis (the more common spelling) is just one way the inflammatory bowel condition could be described on a death certificate. "Summe...

James Exom Taylor was born on 9 May 1837 in Pulaksi County, Georgia, the son of Charles Edward Taylor (1810-1886) and Charlotte Exum Phillips (1814-1877). Aside from the ten years he was married to Anna Bell Jordan (d. 1882), James lived the bachelor life, usually occupied with farming pursuits. James maintained a close friendship with members of the George Walker family, whose sons settled the Longstreet community where James was born. Upon James's death in 1913, Dr. T. D. Walker wrote the tribute to his friend transcribed below, and James was laid to rest by his late wife in the Walker Cemetery at Bleckley County, Georgia. Bleckley was carved from Pulaski the year before James's death. In the dim unknown standeth God, within the shadow, keeping watch above His own. Note:  This tribute is a classic example of early 20th-century memorial writing. During this era, particularly in the South, it was customary for friends or family to write highly sentimentalized tributes for newsp...

Charley Andrew White, the eldest son of Virginia Cathey and Andrew J. White, was born on New Year's Day 1873 in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. The world Charley was born into was full of racial tension. He was just 103 days old when the Colfax Massacre took place that year on Easter Sunday, about 80 miles south of his home. As many as 150 men, all but three of whom were Black, were murdered at the Colfax courthouse in Grant Parish, Louisiana—the deadliest incident of racial and political violence of the Reconstruction Era. When Charley was three years old, white men were still undoing Reconstruction Era policies in spectacular fashion. The Supreme Court decided, in U.S. v. Cruikshank , that the federal government couldn't prosecute individuals for civil rights violations; only states could. As Charley grew up in the 1880s, he witnessed the total collapse of Reconstruction Era protections for Black Americans and the solidified rise of the Jim Crow system in North-Central Louisiana...

The Southern Christian Advocate  is a weekly religious newspaper that began publication out of Charleston, South Carolina in the early summer of 1837. Obituaries published in the paper are characterized as having a strong religious emphasis, often including the manner of death or descriptions of the "death-struggle," and flowery, triumphant, and emotional language. The obituaries are excellent examples of the 19th-century "Good Death" ideal, where a person's behavior and spiritual state on their deathbed were seen as the ultimate evidence of their character and salvation. In the obituary transcribed below, you'll notice a candid admission of a "spiritual lapse." That is a rare find in these usually polished tributes. The following is a transcription of the obituary published in the Southern Christian Advocate  on the death of Thomas D. Walker of Pulaski County, Georgia. Thomas, born 9 May 1808, was a son of George Walker II. Burial was in the Walke...

Robert L. Walker was born in 1853, a son of Ann Lucus (1811-1881) and David Walker (1798-1861). Robert died in November 1875 "at his home on Longstreet" in Pulaski County, Georgia. Longstreet was a community settled by the Walker family in the early 1800s. George Walker II, a Revolutionary War soldier and grandfather of Robert, settled in Pulaski County about the time of its formation in 1808. His home is said to have been built in a hilly section near the Twiggs County line. Sons of George, including David, built their homes on a three and a half mile stretch of the surrounding flatlands that became known as "Longstreet." The Walker family cemetery, where Robert was laid to rest upon his death, is located in what is now Bleckley County (created from Pulaski in 1912). He is memorialized on a stone largely dedicated to his parents. While searching for an obituary for Robert, I came across a "Tribute of Respect" published in the 4 December 1875 edition of th...

Five counties in northeast Georgia—Madison, Elbert, Oglethorpe, Oconee, and Clarke—were the entire world for three generations of the Eberhart family. Landscapes ranged from deep rural isolation to a bustling, rail-connected, manufacturing mecca. The more than three decades between the birth of John Eberhart, about 1841, and that of his son Stokely (Stokes) in 1878 were a whirlwind. The railroad arrived—bringing the outside world with it; the Civil War emancipated, devastated, and nearly starved; and Reconstruction came and went. Stokes probably thought the stories he heard about the gains African Americans made shortly after the Civil War were tall tales and not to be believed. Just months before he was born, Georgia adopted a new state constitution that instituted a poll tax used to disenfranchise Black voters. The lives of Stokes and his children, including a son named John Lee, were defined by a complex navigation of agrarian labor and the rigid, often violent, social codes of the ...