May 2, 2005
The Kinkade trip
For pics of our return trip, Oct, 2006, click here.
1070 miles in 19.5 hours of driving in one weekend made this the longest short trip we've done. But some things don't happen unless you just focus and grab your opportunity. So Quinn and I took off Friday after school for Hannibal, MO. We had some hunting to do.
We camped at Mark Twain Cave Campground. The people had that good old Missouri hospitality and the campground restrooms were the cleanest I've ever seen. That evening, we made a fire and Quinn played Torch. We slept dreamlessly in the cool spring air.
In the morning, we had breakfast at the Mark Twain Dinette and went back to the cave. The tour was great, with lots of beautiful passageways. The teenage tour guide was a trainee trying to master the obviously canned spiel filled with Tom Sawyer's adventures and awful, lame jokes. Perfect vacation fare. I shot this video and the ones below on my SonyEricsson P900 camera phone. You need to download Quicktime viewer to watch them. If they don't play, right-click and Save Target As... or Open in New Window....
After the cave tour, we got down to business and crossed the Mississippi into Illinois. With the help of a new 2nd cousin, we had located the gravesites of Quinn's 5dm and his 6d. (That's our shorthand for his dad's dad's dad's dad's dad's mom and his dad's dad's dad's dad's dad's dad. It's more concise and informative than saying ggg grandmother and gggg grandfather since it specifies the exact ancestry path, so you know which of a person's 64 gggg grandparents you're talking about. I've never seen another system in use that does this.)
Anyway, I'd been looking for their graves my whole life. Here is Cynthia Barnett Patton Kinkade Severs McPherson's grave. It's at Green Pond Cemetery in Pike County, IL. She's buried with the Longs, with whom she lived in her later years. The 1873 stone was still readable:
Cynthia
wife of Wm. McPherson
Died
April 10, 1873
Aged
82 years
A kind soul by the name of Jim Ottwell did some recon for me in advance of our trip, so there were little red flags marking the stone. We never would have found it without his help. Thanks, Jim!
We had a picnic lunch and got back on the road. We had 4 hours of driving to make it to Lawrence County on the other side of Illinois. And we had another new friend to meet, Jay Dee White. He turned out to be a good friend to have. We met Jay Dee at his home in the middle of nowhere, south of Sumner, IL. We followed his truck to the Kinkade cemetery. Never would have found it without him. It's just a patch of trees in a field a fair piece from the county road. Even the folks who live there didn't know much about it.
When we hiked through the muddy field, this is all we saw. Ever skeptical, I wanted proof that we were in the right place. The obelisk that had been on top of this base was pinned under a tree. (Apparently, the tree had fallen, but since no one was there, it didn't make a sound. That settles that.) I learned later that the obelisk was already down in the 1970s. At first glance, it appeared that the obelisk had fallen on its face with the lettering down. Granite is about 200 lbs/cu ft, so I'd guess the stone weighs close to a ton. But after clearing away the detritus, we found these inscriptions on the top and side faces:
We recognized these words from the Lawrence County cemetery book, so we knew we'd found the Kinkade Cemetery. Caroline Matilda Kinkade Pottinger had placed the obelisk for her parents, and we found a little stone marked "C. M. P." marking her grave as well.
The polished granite of the obelisk looked new even though it was placed prior to Caroline's death in 1888. We found two more bases missing their stones and we wondered if we'd find anything else under the debris of 100 or more autumns. Jay Dee warmed my heart when he said he'd be happy to come back in the morning with a chainsaw, pry bars and rakes.
This is the view from the road toward the cemetery. It's the clump of trees in the center of the photo. Nearly vanished, really.
We'd had a long and fruitful day, so it felt good to make camp at Red Hills State Park, one of those little-known gems that campers don't tell too many people about for fear of it being ruined by its popularity. In the morning, we walked to the lake which lay still and glassy in the cold spring air. (Quicktime video.)
We met Jay Dee at 7:30 and followed him to the site. We rode his Gator through the muck this time and started cutting the large tree that had fallen on the obelisk. We used the pry bars to lift it and placed logs underneath it so we could see all 4 sides. It memorializes my 5d, George Kinkade and his wife, Sarah McAllister, who is not my ancestor. George and Cynthia, above, are the parents of my 4d, Wm Porter Severs. There's a whole story there and the circumstances made it hard to find out about these people.
Using a steel rod, I probed the ground around the two bases we had found. At one, we found this stone, reading "E. M." about 2' underground. I think it's Ealsa Miller, 1778-1856, a sister of George Kinkade.
This base was similar, with the stone fragment found about a foot down nearby. There is no lettering on the stone, which appears to be sandstone, so it might be older than the others. This could be Samuel Kinkade, 1752-1834, George's father and Revolutionary War veteran, or Hugh Kinkade, who died at the age of 35 in 1824.
Here's a look back at the work we did. You can see another piece of granite which served as a base for the pedestal, which itself sat on the large limestone base in front of Jay Dee. This piece was nearly submerged in the soft humus. All we could do was raise it to ground level and leave it there.
Here's Quinn with his 6d. His 7d, Samuel Kinkade, is known to be buried here also, but we found no marker.
The crew. Many thanks to Jay Dee for skipping church and hauling all his gear out to help us. I like to think we prevented this cemetery from vanishing for at least another 20 years.
Quicktime videos of the Gator ride home: Video1. Video2.