Letters to the Departed - Cagle Children

Today’s post continues the story of the decoration of the graves with the letters written to the Cagle children. (If you haven’t read the previous post, Ginger and I conducted a ritual in early June of decorating each grave with a wildflower bouquet and a letter expressing what we might say to the recipient if we could.)

Marked only by foot stones with initials, there is some guesswork involved in addressing these letters to the Cagle children. Piecing together what is known from various records about the Cagle family with the initials, we are reasonably confident in the identifications, with a couple of caveats. There are two stones that begin with the initial ‘M”. Which is Martha, which Martin? We have assumed that MSC, lying next to Martin Sr, is Martha. Martha and her father were the first family members laid to rest in the Cemetery and died within a span of two years. It seems an acceptable guess that they might lie next to one another. The second caveat is that the SHH letter is pure speculation - we have no data at all on this burial other than that it is included in the Cagle family row, and has a foot stone identical to the Cagle stones. The assumption that SHH died as an infant or small child is based on the absence of any corresponding adult from the records of the family.

In any case, the sentiments expressed are genuinely placed even if the details might be questioned.

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Martha (MSC),

Sweet child, carried off by scarlet fever.  Did your little sister, Mary, avoid the illness or did she simply survive it?  Did it rage through the entire family, striking your brothers as well?  I can imagine the care your mother took of you, the prayers she offered for your deliverance, the anguish she felt as she watched the life ebb from you, and the sorrow with which she laid you to rest.  With the possible exception of the unknown grave, you are first inhabitant of the Cemetery.  I wonder how the location was chosen.  Was it simply convenient, was it special to you, or special to your mother?  Did you once play where you now lie?  I will, in any case, think of you at play in the fields of the Lord.

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Martin (MVC),

Martin, a strapping boy carried off at the age of 15 or 16.  Your loss must have been a great blow to your mother and siblings.  Another sad addition to the Cemetery, the graves now beginning to form a row.  I wonder how close the Cemetery was to the house the family lived in.  No trace of that house exists today, and no knowledge of where it might have been.  I wonder If your mother was able to walk out in the cool of the early evening and visit with you, your sister, and your father.  Perhaps she sat by your grave and spoke to you, finding solace here among her dead.

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Edward (ECC),

A young man cut down in your prime, perhaps a casualty of the Civil War, perhaps dying here in Fannin County before the call of war caught up with you, you lie here in obscurity.  Though as I think about it, it is only obscurity for those of us who walk the Cemetery today.   You were undoubtedly laid to rest lovingly in the bosom of your family.  Though your rest is soon to be disturbed, you will remain surrounded by those who knew and loved you.

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John (JHC),

You last appear in the historical records as a young boy of 9 in the 1860 census.  The date of your death we cannot know.  Did your sister, Frances, take responsibility for you and Mary after your mother died and your brothers were called to war?  Did you live to become a young man or did you succumb to a childhood illness?  We must rest content that whatever your earthly history, you now reside with your family in a realm beyond our ken.

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SHH,

You are a mystery.  Your position in the Cemetery indicates that you are member of the Cagle family.  That much seems very clear.  I believe you to be an infant or child of Frances Cagle.  Frances married Thomas Hale in 1856, and I am guessing your identity based on the initial of your last name.  Though I can find references in the genealogical record of your parents and several of their children, none of the initials match yours exactly.  Perhaps you died as an infant and disappeared from any official records.  Rest in peace, Little Lamb.

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Wilks Cemetery - Making of the Wildflower Bouquets, photo by Ginger Sisco Cook.

Wilks Cemetery - Cagle Foot Stone Letters and Bouquets, photo by Ginger Sisco Cook.

Story by Wanda Holmes Oliver.

Letters to the Departed - Martin & Susan Cagle

There are cemetery traditions that have been followed for generations in both my family and Ginger’s.  In my family we visit the cemetery on the first Sunday in May, decorating the graves, visiting, reminiscing about loved ones that have passed, and sharing the family history and lore with the youngsters.  The day always ends in a big spread at my cousin’s house.  For my generation, it is a day not to be missed.  In early June of this year, Ginger and I decided to pay homage to our friends in the Bonham and Wilks Cemeteries by decorating their graves.  I wrote letters to each person, and Ginger made posies from wildflowers we gathered in the meadows surrounding the cemeteries.  In a series of posts, we want to share with you images of the decorated graves and our letters to the departed.  This initial post will focus on Martin and Susan Cagle.  

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Martin,

When you and Susan married, the independent nation of Texas was just a few weeks old.  As the old saying goes, you weren’t born in Texas, but you got here as soon as you could.  Your daughter Martha, your fifth child, was born here in 1845.  You were truly a pioneer.  I think about the life you lived, arriving in a sparsely populated Fannin County, finding the land you would settle, making a home.  Perhaps farming the rich Bois d’Arc Creek bottom lands.  I know life had to be hard, and yet, growing up on a farm myself, I imagine it was rewarding.  Certainly you knew Nature’s beauty and abundance in a way that few have an experience of today.  You owned land, you owned slaves.  You appear to have enjoyed some level of prosperity.  You died young, only 43.  You left behind a young wife and six children, the oldest 14 and the youngest less than 2.  I wonder how you died.  Did an accident befall you, did you waste away from a fever? I think of how grief-struck your family must have been.  How large the hole left in their lives, both practical and emotional.  I think of Susan and the older children struggling to go on without you.  

You were not the first burial in the cemetery.  There is the unknown grave that could have preceded you, and there is the grave that I believe must be that of your little daughter Martha who died in 1850.  But your tombstone holds the earliest recorded death date, 12/11/1852.  You have been resting in peace in this lovely spot for almost 166 years.  You were a slave owner, something that in life would have divided us, but today I wish you nothing but peace in the new home being prepared for you.  May you rest well.

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Susan,

Left, at the age of 38, a widow with six children, the oldest no more than 14 and the youngest a toddler, did you regret the move to Texas?  Did you pine for home and family?  Or did you pull your children around you and thrive?  I see you on the Fannin County Tax Rolls in 1858, and as a head of household in the 1860 census, so I know you stayed on the land and carried on.  You & Martin had buried little Martha back in 1850.  By 1860, your eldest daughter, Frances, had married, and you had buried another child, a son, Martin, who died as a teenager.  The other four children were still living with you - Robert, a young man of 23, Edward a lad of 19, Mary blossoming at 13, and John a youngster of 9.  Did any of you have an inkling then that time was running short for you?  Or that a brutal war that would change your family forever was about to break out? By August of 1861, the Civil War had already begun as the children laid you to rest.  You and Martin share a lovely tombstone -  tall, graceful, and richly decorated.  The other Cagle graves have only small slabs with carved initials - no embellishment, no details.  I imagine the children raising the monument to their lost parents, and I hope they were all together to dedicate it, before the eldest boys rode off to war.  Robert is known to have served in the Confederate Army.  Edward was of an age to serve.  Neither appear in the annals of Fannin County after the war, and the grave marked ESC is possibly Edward’s.  John is likely the JHC buried next to you, the date of his death lost to history.  Like Frances, we know that Mary grew up, married, and had children, though, sadly, I can find no living descendent of either of them in this area today.  I think of you as a strong woman in a line of strong pioneering women and I salute you.

Cagle Monument Decorated, photo by Ginger Sisco Cook.

Wanda Photographing the Decorated Graves, photo by Ginger Sisco Cook.

In our research, we have managed to connect with living descendants of both the Wilks and Bonham families.  We have not been able to identify any living descendants of the Cagle family.  In sharing the following family tree, I hope to add substance to the lives of Martin and Susan, but I also hope that a reader will recognize a name and come forward to help us flesh out their story - to help us make that living connection.

Story by Wanda Holmes Oliver.

Growing Up on Bois D'Arc

My parents moved to Fannin County from Grayson County in 1955.  I was two and my brother had not yet arrived.  My grandfather had bought a couple of hundred acres north of Windom at Spring Hill that my dad would farm.  My dad and his brother had also purchased a farm on the east side of Bois d’Arc Creek near Bonham.  That land sits directly across the creek from the Legacy Ridge golf course and is now largely broken up into small acreages.  The brothers split the land, my father taking the northern part and my uncle the southern.  When you travel US Highway 82 in that area today, you drive right through the middle of what was once my family farm.  

We lived on the farm at Spring Hill, but spent equally as much time on the Bois d’Arc place. Our bottom land was used for crops, primarily maize and alfalfa.  Our uplands were used for pasture.  Our only timber was a strip along the creek itself and a few groves scattered here and there in the pastures.  A lot of my days there were spent hoeing fields, feeding cows, and hauling hay but there were lots of days spent tromping around alone, with my brother, or with my cousins just seeing what we could see.  The timber and the creek always offered the most interesting possibilities and I often marvel that we didn’t break our necks, drown, or wind up snake-bitten.  As long as we were home by supper, or came when my mother or my aunt honked the truck horn, we were left to roam as we pleased.  I would not trade those days for any treasure.

I was in my mid-twenties and living in the city when my father called to tell me he had decided to sell the farm.  His reasons were sound, but I was nevertheless heartbroken.  The next year my father died unexpectedly.  I came to see his decision to sell as one that saved us the greater heartbreak of having to sell after his death.  However, seeing the land upon which I had been formed, and that had served as my anchor, pass to another and be put to new uses was wrenching.  What played out there on a small scale is now playing out on a large scale as the last parcels earmarked for the lake pass into the hands of the North Texas Municipal Water District.  So many families have sacrificed the land that anchored their lives to make this new reservoir possible.

My favorite place on our farm was a grove of tall, tall trees that I called my “cathedral trees”.  I felt a spiritual connection to the universe walking among them.  The trees seemed older than time and stretched majestically heavenward, filling the sky and my imagination. This photo, taken from the bottomlands on Mike Barbaro’s ranch, quite near the location of new dam, reminds me of my trees.  My trees were lost years ago, the grief for these is fresh and raw.

Story by Wanda Holmes Oliver.

The Last Embrace, photo by Wanda Holmes Oliver.

Finding the Cemetery

Ginger and I had been discussing the effort that became this project for several weeks when, on March 31, 2018, we set out to find the Wilks Family cemetery using directions from the Fannin County GenWeb site. We headed to Carson, turned onto County Road 2700 and began to try to match the instructions we had to the reality on the ground. “Turn on the lane by the large pipe fence” had sounded reasonable enough back in my kitchen, but turned out to be woefully insufficient. We made one detour, executing a multiple-point (more than three for sure) turn on a narrow lane once we realized it couldn’t possibly be right. Back on CR2700, we continued, looking left and right for clues. Up ahead a pick-up pulled up at a gate, waiting for us to pass before turning onto the county road. We decided to ask the young man driving if he could help us, and stopped to chat. He could not, but his friend, who pulled up behind him while we talked, could. In a moment of serendipity almost miraculous, we met Mike Barbaro, the owner of the property that contained the Cemetery. And he generously altered his plans on the spot to take us to see it.

Had we or they been a few seconds sooner or later in arriving at that point, we would have passed like ships in the night, and this project would have taken a completely different trajectory. We would never have stumbled onto the Cemetery by ourselves. It is in an out of the way location deep onto private property.

The cemetery is in a beautiful glade surrounded by an old fence of upright wooden staves, dotted heavily with irises, and crowned by a large lilac bush. The fence is falling down, and the underbrush threatens to take over, but on that first visit, the lilac bush was blooming and I found myself thinking about the love with which it had surely been planted. Now lonely and overgrown, the place had obviously figured importantly in the lives of these families. I felt a tenderness and fullness of heart towards the inhabitants of this lovely place. Feelings reinforced as we walked among the tombstones and realized how many of them marked the graves of infants and children. The people lying there took powerful hold of my imagination and I knew that I wanted to learn all that I could about them. As we shared our reactions driving home, we realized that we had been similarly affected. Our project began to take on more form and direction, and we knew that these families would become ours.

Story by Wanda Holmes Oliver.

All but Forgotten, Resting in Peace. Photo by Wanda Holmes Oliver.

Sprig of Wilks Cemetery Lilac on my Windowsill. Photo by Wanda Holmes Oliver.