Last week, I introduced you to Dallas, Texas’ Greenwood Cemetery and its history. Today, let’s find out more about some of the people buried there. The first grave I’m going to feature uncovered a story I didn’t go looking for. Thanks to my husband, Chris, it came to me.

I was going through the photos he took there a few weeks after our trip and found this one of a crow perched beside the marker for a J.M. Thurmond. It wasn’t very fancy so I probably wouldn’t have noticed it. But that crow got Chris’ attention so he took a picture.

Something made me look into J.M. Thurmond’s past. It turned out to be quite a story.

Born in 1836, James Madison Thurmond served as a private in Company E, Fourth Kentucky Cavalry during the Civil War. My research indicated he fought for the Confederacy but some sources point to a Union affiliation. There were units from both sides of the war with Kentucky soldiers. After the war, Thurmond moved to Texas and was appointed mayor of Bryan, Texas, by Gov. E. J. Davis in November 1869, an office he held for only two months before leaving in January 1870. Thurmond later moved to Dallas and opened a law practice.

Thurmond was elected mayor of Dallas on a reform ticket in April 1879 and re-elected in April 1880. In September 1880, the city council voted to remove him based on not making those promised reforms, and appointed John J. Good to fill the vacancy. Thurmond married Amanda J. Bentley on February 14, 1880, in Dallas. They had one son, James M. Thurmond Jr.

A Simmering Feud Explodes

One of the attorneys that worked hard to get Thurmond removed as mayor (who was now a judge) was Atlanta native and Confederate veteran Robert E. Cowart. Thus began a feud between the two that simmered for two years until it exploded on March 14, 1882 in a Dallas courthouse.

On that day, angry words were exchanged by Cowart and Thurmond that were witnessed by others. Thurmond drew his pistol but Cowart was faster, shooting Thurmond in the head and killing him instantly. He was only 46. Cowart was charged with murder and convicted later that year but a second trial acquitted him. Public opinion was with Cowart that he had shot Thurmond in self defense.

After his acquittal, Cowart spent many years in Washington, D.C. representing Texas interests in Congress. But he never quite escaped the reverberations of the shooting. One article I found said, “Privately, he expressed himself as regretting he had not let Thurmond kill him, and he was inclined to regard the early death of his wife and the long invalidism of a son as somehow a judgment.”

When Cowart died at the age of 80 in 1924, he was buried in Greenwood Cemetery.

Cattle King of Texas

One of the few mausoleums at Greenwood is for Col. Christopher Columbus (“C.C.”) Slaughter. His colorful life could fill a book easily but I’ll try to keep it brief.

As a boy, C.C. worked cattle with his father and at age 12, he helped drive the family’s 92-head herd to a ranch on the Trinity River in Freestone County, Texas, where the family moved in 1852. At 17, C.C. was hauling timber and processing Collin County wheat into flour for sale. With the money he earned, he bought his uncle’s interest in the Slaughter cattle herd. His family did not neglect his education, tutoring him at home before he graduated from the now-defunct Larissa College in Cherokee County, Texas.

In 1857, Slaughter became a rancher with his father in Palo Pinto County, Texas, where they owned 15,000 cattle. They sold beef to Fort Belknap and local Native American reservations. In 1861, he married Cynthia Anna Jowell and together, they had five children.

During the Civil War, he served as a colonel in Terry’s Texas Rangers of the Confederate Army. Together with Charles Goodnight, he helped rescue Cynthia Ann Parker, an American kidnapped by Comanches at the age of 10 in 1836. I photographed her grave last year while at Fort Sill in Lawton, Okla.

After the war, he founded the C. C. Slaughter Cattle Company, plus co-founded the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association in 1873. Cynthia passed away in 1876 and he married Carrie Averill 1877. He established the American National Bank in 1884, which is now part of the First National Bank chain.

Owned Over a Million Acres

By 1905, Col. Slaughter owned over 40,000 head of cattle and oversaw over a million acres of land in West Texas. As a result, he was for some years the largest taxpayer in Texas. He also added to his family, having four children with second wife, Carrie.

In his later years, Col. Slaughter gave generously. He helped establish Baylor Hospital of Dallas, serving on its board of trustees and was president of the United Confederate Veterans. He also served as vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention and a member of the executive board of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

Slaughter maintained strict control over his operations until 1910, when he suffered a broken hip that crippled him for the remainder of his life. After his death at age 81 in 1919, his heirs divided his ranch and land holdings, and sold them. His mausoleum at Greenwood contains Col. Slaughter, his two wives, two children who died in infancy, his daughter, Delia Slaughter Wright, and Delia’s husband, Judge Gilbert Wright.

Death of a Young Wife

The monument to young Jennie Thomas Scollard is beautiful. But I chose it for more than that reason alone.

Born in 1860, Jennie Thomas was a native of Texas. But her future husband Thomas W. Scollard was British born in 1849. He likely arrived in Dallas in the 1870s. He and Jennie married were married in 1880 and spent their first years in Galveston, Texas.

Unlike many businessmen in Dallas, Scollard was more interested in sheep than cattle. He became a wool buyer/dealer. He also was involved in real estate, constructing the Jennie and Juanita buildings in downtown Dallas. I even managed to find a picture of the one named after Jennie on Ancestry.

Thomas’ fortunes prospered. He and Jennie had three children together, two living to adulthood. But Jennie’s health began to falter in 1887. According to her funeral notice, she went to stay at a place known as Wootan Wells, which promoted itself as a pleasure resort and health spa. They claimed that the waters had restorative powers.

Located in Bremond, Texas, Wootan Wells was just one of many resorts that socialites flocked to in the late 1800s/early 1900s. You could even purchase their water and take it home with you. At one point, it boasted hotels, a bottling works, dance pavilion, and school. A fire that swept through Bremond in 1915 did considerable damage and Wootan Wells’ remaining buildings were torn down in the early 1920s.

Sadly, Jennie died at Wootan Wells at the age of 26 on June 12, 1887. Her funeral notice attributed it to “dropsy of the heart”, meaning she suffered from edema and heart failure. I found it interesting that the notice also made a particular observation about her “life-like appearance” at her visitation.

Thomas Scollard remarried in 1889 to Fannie Bossart, who was 21 years his junior. They had five children who lived to adulthood. One infant born in 1889 named Jennie is buried in the Scollard plot. She has no marker.

When Thomas Scollard died suddenly on his veranda at the age of 55 in 1905, he was buried at Greenwood in the family plot without a marker. Records indicate that after Fannie Scollard died in 1959, she was initially interred at Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park (which I visited as well). But she was later moved to Greenwood to be buried with Thomas and the two Jennies in June 1960. Her grave is not marked either.

We’re not finished at Greenwood Cemetery. Come back for Part III.

 

Who visits Dallas, Texas in the middle of July, one of the hottest months of the year?

ME!

Every five years, my husband and I take a trip out of state to celebrate our wedding anniversary. For 2018, our 15th, we chose Texas. We knew it would be boiling-lava hot but summer is always the best time for us to travel because our son can stay with his grandparents while we’re gone.

We arrived in Dallas with plans to visit at least one cemetery during our visit and ended up seeing many more. The first one was Greenwood Cemetery in the Uptown neighborhood. But it wasn’t always called that.

Birth of Trinity Cemetery

The establishment of Trinity Cemetery began with a man who played a key role in the prominence Dallas would eventually have. But one of Alabama native William H. Gaston’s first glimpses of Dallas would be as a 20-year-old young man on the day after the fire that nearly destroyed the city in 1860.

William joined the Confederacy with three of his brothers after the outbreak of the Civil War, rising quickly among his peers to become known as the “boy captain”. After the war, Capt. Gaston did quite well with his cotton crop, making enough money to leave the farm and enter into business in Dallas. His focus was on banking and real estate.

A sign at the cemetery explains that the land upon which Trinity Cemetery is located on was once “part of a Republic of Texas grant called the John Grigsby League, given for service in the Battle of San Jacinto.” After some legal wrangling, Capt. Gaston acquired the land and established the cemetery along with his banking partner, Capt. W.H. Thomas. Some sources say that the first recorded burial at Trinity was a Mrs. Susan Bradford in March 1875. I found no memorial for her on Find a Grave.

Silent City of the Dead

An article in the Dallas Weekly Herald on November 13, 1884 describes the cemetery  this way:

Our reporter took an excursion over the Belt street railroad yesterday and, leaving the cars where the road turns out of the McKinney road, walked out to Trinity cemetery. This silent city of the dead is truly a beautiful location and, although it is small for so large a city as Dallas, it can be made as beautiful a cemetery as can be found in all the land. Young forest trees and cedars abound, which, if trimmed up properly and with nice shelled walks and drives winding among them, would make it a lovely spot for the repose of the dead.

Unfortunately, by 1896, the cemetery had fallen into a state of disrepair. One article even mentioned cattle grazing in it. Capt. Gaston had plunged into the business world, developing much of East Dallas and starting the State Fair, so his attention was elsewhere. The cemetery was renamed Greenwood and an association was formed to oversee its operation and upkeep.

According to Find a Grave, Greenwood has close to 8,000 recorded burials but an article I found indicates there are hundreds of unmarked graves on the grounds. Originally, it consisted of 30 acres but I’m not sure what it currently is. The Uptown neighborhood that surrounds it was once farmland but is now prime real estate that’s almost completely developed.

Both Sides Buried Here

Both Union and Confederate soldiers are buried at Greenwood. There’s a special section dedicated to Union Soldiers that is cared for by a local chapter of the Sons of Union Veterans. After the Civil War, many Union veterans headed to the South for a new life. Cheap land was plentiful and business opportunities were abundant. According to one plaque I saw, about 110 Union veterans are buried at Greenwood.

One of those men was John Comley Bigger, an Ohioan who fought with the 92nd Illinois Infantry at the Battle of Chickamauga. Bigger would go on to practice law in Dallas in 1875 and was appointed the U.S. Attorney for Texas in 1882. He led two Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) chapters in Dallas. A Prohibitionist, Bigger was admired by his colleagues for his “probity and kindness of heart”. When he died in 1900, he was buried at Greenwood Cemetery.

According to a plaque, there are about 250 Confederate veterans buried at Greenwood. There is no Confederate monument at Greenwood, but there is one that I mistook for one when I first saw it. The monument to Captain Samuel P. Emerson certainly looks like one but it was carved just for him.

In 1861, at age 29, Kentucky native Samuel Emerson enlisted in the Confederate Army. Under the command of General Simon Buckner, he saw action at Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River in Tennessee. When the fort fell to federal forces under General Ulysses S. Grant in February 1862, General Buckner surrendered some 15,000 troops.

Capt. Emerson, however, escaped by swimming and wading the river. He subsequently had a number of adventures as captain of a company of Confederate scouts. He moved to Dallas after the Civil War.

From reading his Find a Grave memorial, I learned that Capt. Emerson was close friends with Confederate Brigadier General William Lewis Cabell and his daughter, Mrs. Katie Cabell Currie Muse. She was not only president of the Dallas chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy but was an avid listener to Capt. Emerson’s wishes for his monument and funeral plans.

After he died on October 21, 1900, she did what she could to carry out those wishes. In his will, Emerson left $5,000 for Katie to use for his monument, which was unveiled a year after his death. Sharing the plot with Emerson are 36 other former Confederates whose graves all face south, marked by two rows of identical white stones.

Garlington Monument

Located close to Capt. Emerson’s monument is the large monument to Moses D. Garlington and his wife, Annie Moore Garlington. I could find very little information about it. It’s my guess that it was made after Annie’s death but I’m not sure. I did not take a very good photo of it and the construction going on in the background didn’t help.

Born in Mississippi in 1835, Moses Garlington became a clerk/book-keeper in Trenton, La., where he spent 18 years. He entered the Confederate Army as second lieutenant of Company A of the 17th Louisiana Infantry, and came out as a regimental quartermaster. In 1868, he married Arkansas native Annie Moore. Over the years, they would have five children together that lived to adulthood, one having died in infancy.

The Garlingtons moved to Dallas around 1872 and Moses got involved in a business partnership with the Central Railroad. His fortunes prospered over the years through his wholesale produce business and he amassed quite a fortune, known for dealing in cash and eschewing credit of any kind. He died of malarial fever on Sept. 22, 1894.

Eldest son William took over the business for his father. Annie would have a home with his family for the rest of her life. She died at the age of 70 of apoplexy and heart disease on April 20, 1918. I am not certain what the three figures at the top of the monument are meant to represent. Perhaps someone reading this will know.

This is just the tip of the iceberg so join me next time for more stories from Dallas’ Greenwood Cemetery.

 

 

Last week, I introduced you to Fort Yellowstone Cemetery, located in Mammoth Hot Springs, Wy. within Yellowstone National Park. I focused mainly on the children’s graves I found. Today, we’re going to look into the lives (and deaths) of some of the adults buried there.

In many cases, as with the children, there isn’t much known about some of the people buried at this cemetery. That’s definitely the case for Nellie Auditto, if that is indeed her true last name.

Who was Nellie Auditto?

There’s a simple white government-issued grave marker for Nellie. We know from cemetery records that Nellie died on Aug. 11, 1905 from diphtheria at the Norris Hotel. There’s no mention for her age. But records do list her as working for the Yellowstone Park Association (YPA) at the time of her death.

The YPA was created in 1886 by the Northern Pacific Railroad to take over the properties and operation of the bankrupt Yellowstone Park Improvement Co. (YPIC). The YPA built and managed the various hotels in Yellowstone. Nellie died at “Norris Hotel”, which would have been at the Norris Geyser Basin about 20 miles south of Fort Yellowstone.

There were a number of hotels constructed at Norris over the late 1880s through to 1901, when the last one was built. It also had a lunch station to feed hungry travelers passing through. It’s my guess that Nellie worked at the hotel or lunch station. It closed in 1916 and was razed in 1928.

Nellie’s last name puzzled me. She was the only Auditto even recorded in Find a Grave’s records. On Ancestry.com, I couldn’t find any Audittos either.

It was when I looked a bit harder on Ancestry.com that it became clear to me that Nellie’s name had been misspelled on her marker. If you look at the cemetery record for her, her last name is “Arditto”. Not “Auditto”. There are several Ardittos that lived in California, even another Nellie Arditto (not the same one). Unfortunately, I still couldn’t track her with this correction. It’s possible that Nellie was a nickname.

Death of William Eaton

Civilian William Eaton is listed on the same page as Nellie. But his death was decidedly more violent. According to records, he died on May 30, 1904 when he was “killed by runaway team at Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park.” That’s all we know. His age is not listed.

There’s also little known about William M. Johnson but he is the only African-American buried at Fort Yellowstone Cemetery that I’m aware of. He died on June 21, 1907 and was employed as a civilian to a Major Pitcher. He died of double “catarrh/pneumonia” at the post hospital. As with the others buried here, we don’t know William’s age.

The Army Surgeon’s Wife

The most ornate grave marker in the cemetery is for Margaret Caroline McRee Stevens. She was the wife of Army Surgeon Joel King Stevens. Her marker explains that her husband was served in the Mexican War of 1846 with the Fourth Louisiana Volunteers.

Margaret married Mississippi native Joel Stevens on Jan. 27, 1848 in Louisiana at the age of 24. They moved to Texas where they had three children. During the Civil War, Joel died on May 18, 1864 at the Battle of Yellow Bayou in Louisiana. He was serving as Captain in the 36th Regiment of the Texas Cavalry of the Confederate Army.

Capt. Stevens’ death left Margaret a widow at age 40, with her youngest child being only six years old. The family moved to Mississippi to live with her sister, Melissa McRee Jayne, who was married to banker Joseph Jayne.

It’s my guess that with the help of his uncle, Margaret’s son Robert Ratcliff Stevens (born in 1855) was able to follow in his father’s military footsteps. Robert graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1877. He then served at several posts in the western U.S. before being assigned to the Quartermaster Office at the Army and Navy General Hospital in Hot Springs, Ark. in 1889. After leaving Hot Springs, he was in charge of construction of Fort Logan H. Roots in North Little Rock.

It was in the 1890s that Robert was tasked with overseeing improvements at Yellowstone and Yosemite National Park, as well as the expansion of Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. I can’t prove it, but by this time Margaret was likely living with her son and his new wife, Katie, whom Robert had just married the year before. Margaret died on Nov. 17, 1895 at the age of 71.

Sadly, Katie Stevens died just four years later Jan. 12, 1899 at the age of 29. She is buried in Oakland and Fraternal Historic Cemetery Park in Little Rock, Ark. Robert served as Quartermaster at the Presidio in San Francisco, Calif. and fought in the Philippine-American War, advancing to the rank of colonel. He died on Jan. 28, 1931 and is buried at San Francisco National Cemetery.

Killed by “Old Two Toes”

The last marker I’m going to share with you is actually new. It replaced the original wooden one that was deteriorating rapidly. You can see a photo of that marker on Find a Grave here. I’m glad to see it was replaced by something more permanent.

Frank Welch has the distinction of being Yellowstone National Park’s first documented human fatality from a bear attack. I don’t know how old Frank was, but he did own a ranch, was married and was old enough to have a daughter who was married.

Frank worked as a teamster in Yellowstone National Park. The attack took place near Ten Mile Spring at Turbid Lake while he was hauling a load of hay and oats to a camp near Sylvan Pass. Welch and two co-workers were camping, one of the men sleeping in the wagon while Welch and another slept under it. As they slept, a bear approached their camp.

The bear in question, nicknamed “Old Two Toes”, had already injured others in the park. It got the moniker in 1912 after losing some toes when the man he attacked fought back. The bear entered Welch’s camp around 1 a.m. and attacked him. The other two men tried to divert the bear with no success. After the bear left, the two men flagged down a car and took Welch to Fort Yellowstone’s hospital in Mammoth Hot Springs where he died on Sept. 11, 1916.

“Death In Yellowstone” notes that the possible cause for the attack may have been because Welch slept with his bacon under his pillow, which certainly would have enticed a hungry bear. After Welch’s death, the bear was was killed. You can read the account of it in the above newspaper article but I’m not entirely sure all its details are true, having read some varying stories.

Postscript

I left Fort Yellowstone Cemetery with a sense of accomplishment that I’d found this  elusive burial site. But even two years later, I feel there’s so much more to the people buried there that I will never know. For different reasons, they were working or even just passing through this untamed part of the country few had ever seen. And it was where they died.

It’s also where their remains rest, buried at this peaceful hidden burial ground where few feet ever tread.