Remembering an Antebellum Blacksmith

Near Halloween, here’s a somber photo that I look several years ago on a late autumn day.

Our family cemetery---originally the burial ground of pioneer families of this part of the township----is a few miles out in the country from my hometown. You have to take a county road off the state highway, and then turn onto a gravel lane across a field and into the woods to get there. Now, some folks live along the lane now and more trees have been cleared, but when I was a kid, you couldn’t see the graveyard from the country road because of the trees. Once you were down the lane, you’d come into the pretty timber clearing where about 300 people are buried, including my material grandparents, great-grandparents, and some 2-great and 3-great grandparents as well. It was a peaceful, isolated place.

The oldest portion of the graveyard is the northeast corner of the clearing, where some rocks are crudely inscribed 1836 and the oldest professionally carved stone is 1839. When I was a little kid, we visited the cemetery on Memorial Day and other occasions, to “decorate” family graves. I liked to walk back to the old section and read the inscriptions. The section was mildly creepy, which on a sunny day was no problem and kind of cool.(1) In the far corner of the section is a tombstone (visible in this photo) of two children buried away from other graves.(2) My grandma said that the children had died of smallpox and were interred separately so that (in the belief of the time) they could not infect the living.

My favorite old tombstone, though, was this one.  It reads:

Moses Cluxton Sen.
Died
Mar. 13, 1855
Aged
56 years 10 ms & 4 ds.
Remember friends as you pass by
As you are now so once was I
As I am now so you must be

Prepare for death and follow me.

When I was a kid, the tombstone was broken in half and the halves sunken into the ground at an odd angle from each other. For some reason that fascinated me. It was such a sense of abandonment: not only had the old gravestone fallen into disrepair, but its strewn halves weren’t even righted, remaining so for (presumably) many years.

The inscription fascinated me too, because the words DIED and AGED seemed more prominent than the man’s name. And the name seemed so 19th century---”Moses Cluxton, Senior.” That memento mori epitaph is common in old graveyards, though it’s the only example in our little cemetery. As a kid I liked old things, things worth remembering and preserving. This tombstone was one such remnant from the township's first generation.

Later, when I was a teenager, I looked at census records and discovered that Mr. Cluxton was a blacksmith. Although so many people in this graveyard are related to me (either as ancestors or distant uncles or aunts, or cousins), I learned that Mr. Cluxton is very distantly so: his son Lewis married the daughter of a 4-great-uncle of the Mahon family. So he was the father-in-law of a first-cousin-four-times-removed. Relatives of that distant uncle’s wife (the Thompson family) fixed up Mr. Cluxton’s tombstone several years ago. It no longer appears so long abandoned. Here is some additional information: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=cluxton&GSiman=1&GScid=107470&GRid=47966629&

Some of the families buried in this peaceful clearing arrived in the area during the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. I imagine some of my ancestors, living on or around Four Mile Prairie, stopping by the man’s shop to get their wagons repaired and horses shod.  

*****

1. I heard this mysterious-sounding arrangement of a popular song on an adult-contemporary station, which in my young mind I associated with the vanished pioneer community which had lived in the township. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtSL_1-Y8T8
 
2. The inscription reads: “Elvina, daughter of S. & F. Parks Died Aug. 10, 1858 Aged 3 ms & 25 D. Lemuel, son of S. & F. Parks Died Dec. 31, 1859 Aged 3 ms & 21 ds.”