If Fodderstack Could Speak: O Death

O Death

Will Walker

“O, death. O, death. Won’t you spare me over ‘til another year?”
Traditional American folk song

Death was ever-present in the lives of Walker Valley’s early residents. Frederic Webb’s journals provide insight into several deaths that occurred during his brief time in the valley and the customs surrounding such events. He writes of one family who suffered the loss of two of its members:

“The [Reed] family consists of the father—an easy going rather hard-working tho unmanaging N. Car. Man—the mother, a good woman, ‘good talker,’ and like the father none too bright mentally, and his small girls abt. 10 & 12. They lost by death from measles two boys abt. 19 & 4, in the winter—chests were carried, the coffins hung from poles, across the mtn. and buried in our graveyard. All the family were sick and they were buried without a service and probably without a tear shed over them. The family will probably want a service for these boys soon, and we will gladly give it them….”

Two weeks later some good news came to the Reed family, though of a kind that was not without its own sort of burden, as described by Webb in his journal: “[They] have had a baby left on their hands by a ‘no-count’ woman, and will probably adopt it.”

Webb would write in regards to a visit with Loon Grant Moore’s family: “[Gave them] borax to make an eye wash for the baby’s eyes. Baby is a name sake—Margaret Emilie. Pleasant call. Left gifts. Family feeling blue over a stolen cow.” In this case the baby had been named after Fred’s mother Emilie who accompanied him during both of the summers he lived in Walker Valley. Tragically, the child was to pass away.

That same summer, on July 17, 1904, Frederic Webb composed the following entry:

“After our dinner a number of men came up to borrow digging tools as they said they had to dig a grave for the infant daughter of Emma Stephenson, daughter of Radfort Gatting McCarter. McCarter’s wife is a sister of Mary Ann Moore so they felt that this gave them a claim upon our little grave yard. They came in at sundown carrying the small coffin under a pole. After they came up the first request was for a photo of the dead baby in the coffin. This I declined to do. They then asked for a certain song which we hadn’t heard of. He asked for a service which I told him I’d give gladly with any other assistance I could render. I gave a short reading of scripture selected, and offered prayer, and after burial the usual grave services and benediction. A weird strange sight is the manifested grief of the relatives over even a two days old babe as was this. Also the morbid curiosity of even the smallest children to look at the remains. After the service the relatives had to return to their homes by the same long 4 mile walk and it was then near dark. Truly our hearts go out to this people.”