I went to Memphis this weekend with two Marys on my mind. This is the second of a two-part series. This post is devoted to my great-grandmother, Mary Valentine Carpenter.
I’m not sure what I was expecting as I approached the site of my great-grandmother’s grave. Let’s just say, this wasn’t it.
I wrote about Mary Valentine Carpenter last August, my quest to find out information about her and my goal to locate her gravesite. The interest in genealogy was inspired by the release of the 1940 census and how that census led to us putting together the family tree.
To briefly retell the story, Mary was my grandmother’s mother. She met and married my great-grandfather, Sylvaneous Pittman Carpenter, around 1905 in Marshall County, Miss.
In 1910, they were living near downtown Memphis. He worked as a putty maker for the True Test Paint Company. The 1910 census tells us this.
The other part of the story has been passed down through oral history. On or around 1910, Mary met a lady who lived nearby, and who had tuberculosis. My great-grandmother decided to try to care for the lady. While doing so, Mary also contracted the disease and sometime before 1914, Pittman and Mary moved back to Marshall County.
I have always figured that they did so in order to allow Mary to be closer to family who could help care for her and my grandmother, who would have been a little girl at the time. Mary died in Marshall County on October 4, 1914, and was buried in the Pittman Cemetery (named for someone related to my great-grandfather, undoubtedly. His mother’s maiden name was Pittman).
Over the course of the last year, I have searched many websites, chatted with people, poured over lists and all my searching brought me back to the same place – the Pittman Cemetery in rural Marshall County, Miss.
Just to give you some orientation, Marshall County is about 50 miles southeast of Memphis. The Pittman Cemetery is located between the communities of Slayden and Mt. Pleasant and is due north of Holly Springs (the county seat). Using the website Find-A-Grave, I had located the name (Pittman Cemetery) where Mary Valentine Carpenter was buried nearly 100 years ago, and I had also found the location. I even had the GPS coordinates (down to the exact spot in terms of longitude and latitude).
When Lisa and I heard the news about my aunt’s death (I wrote about this yesterday), we built a little time in our schedule to make a side-trip to Slayden. Using driving directions we downloaded – as well as those GPS coordinates – we made our way to this rural community. Four-lane superhighways turned into two-lane old-fashioned highways and those morphed into small country lanes. They got smaller and smaller until we were on a dead-end road. To our right was a nice country home; straight ahead was a field (with a gate) and to the left was a curious gravel road blocked off by a meager, homemade barbed-wire gate.
As I looked at the GPS ap on my phone, I noticed we were close to the coordinates, and as we went toward the barbed wire, we got even closer. Intuition was telling me to go through that fence and up the gravel path.
Up the path about 50 feet, we were getting very close to the exact spot marked by those decimals. Just then, to our left, I noticed a small white lattice fence. We walked over to it and noticed some pronounced rectangular depressions in the ground.
Gravesites, in other words.
As we looked around, we noticed half a dozen or so similar indentions in and around the lattice-work. We also saw some temporary markers that come from mortuaries. You may have seen similar ones. It’s a plastic stick with a label at the top. This is used to temporarily mark a grave until a permanent marker can be added.
The thing is there were no permanent markers. Nothing at all. No field stones. No crumbled granite structures. Nothing.
There were, however, items placed on graves – such as you might do with flowers or other mementos. There was a mylar balloon, a floral arrangement and a teddy bear. Remembering the roster of those buried at the site from Find-a-Grave, I recalled there were two infant brothers, Richard and Albert Hill, who died a year apart just after the turn of the century. Both of them were newborns.
Could that paraphernalia mark the graves of those two boys? Or have there been additional burials on that site since the last one recorded in the 1920s?
Are the flowers there to mark the graves of Ebb Marshall Pittman and his wife Samantha, who are also buried at that site? Or are they, perhaps, for Matthew Jordan. The short gravel road leading to the Pittman Cemetery is named Jordan Cemetery Road.
The site was a little depressing (desolate was the word Lisa used). I’m not here to second guess decisions made a hundred years ago under the cloud of grief. Still, the site looks like a place lost to time. It appears that some people, under unfortunate circumstances of finances and fate, were left there to be forgotten at the edge of those woods beside the gravel path at the end of that dead end road.
As sad as I was for that brief instant, I also felt an unmistakable connection to that place. Unless someone can uncover some 11th hour evidence that my great grandmother is somewhere else, I feel certain we found the spot. I said a brief prayer of thanksgiving at that moment.
And I will pray at that site again, about a year from now. I hope to have many family members with me. We’ll lay a marker at an appropriate spot and say a prayer to remember that generous and courageous woman who made a supreme sacrifice and paid the ultimate price.
We all owe her so much.
JG
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