Grateful for the Kindness of Strangers

A couple of years ago, when Warren and I traveled to Arkansas to find the past history of my mother's family, we came upon a kindness from a stranger that is worth acknowledging. As this is Thanksgiving Week, it seems a good time to be grateful.

We easily found the graves of my mother's parents, Charlie and Susie Gleason in the little town of Prairie Grove, Arkansas, in Washington County.

What was difficult was trying to find the graves of Susie's parents, the Overtons. All I had to start was a cryptic letter from my Aunt Harriet that mentions a trip she and Uncle Wilbur took in the 1970’s where Clifford and Edith M. take them to Rock Spring. She talks of them tramping through briars and a field to find the headstones. J.B. Overton's headstone had his name and his Civil War unit. Harriet Overton’s headstone had her date of birth and death.

It took me a solid week to figure out what her letter meant. Turns out Rock Spring is a pioneer cemetery west of Prairie Grove. For a while, I thought Rock Spring Cemetery was over 3 hours south. We were going to drive down there even if it was really far away. Then I discovered another Rock Spring Cemetery in a close county. Then I found one in Washington County.

I contacted a nice fellow who was a highway worker for years and knew all the back roads of Washington County. He recommended I call a man named William D. This proved to be a great move. William is 80 years old and lives down the road from Rock Spring Cemetery!

He told me that a young man showed up in the spring of that year and started messing around in there. William went over to make sure he wasn’t vandalizing the area. No, the young man was putting up a fence around the graves and mowing down the tall grass and trees that had sprung up around the headstones. Looks much better now, William said.

We met up with William during our visit to Arkansas. William was a very nice gentleman who cared about family and ancestors. He offered to walk with us to show us where the cemetery was.

The photos show the nice gate, sign and fence put in by this young stranger. You can also see the headstones of my great-grandparents, the Overtons. My great-grandfather fought in the Civil War for the north, which in this southern state is probably why he and his wife were buried in an obscure cemetery on a back road in the hills west of Prairie Grove.

The gratitude I feel for this stranger who preserved the cemetery is hard to define. There are almost no stones in the cemetery. Many of them are not inscribed at all. The other two that are probably are the ancestors of this young man. That's what William thought, anyway. This stranger did a great job and it had to have been at considerable expense to himself.

BTW, you can see we left plastic flowers at my great-grandparents graves. This was in hopes that this cemetery's Good Samaritan might return before they were blown away and see that someone else had been there and appreciated his work. We hope he saw and understood!

Thank you, sir, for caring about your ancestors and this cemetery! We are the unintended recipients of your generosity.