"On January 17 1897, German immigrants in the Geronimo area met at Specht school to discuss the need for a community cemetery. The group formed a "Friedhof Gestellschaft" or cemetery association and within a week purchased a five-acre plot of land from Ernst Puls and designated it the Lone Oak Cemetery.The following year, the first burial, that of the one week-old unnamed son of Ernst and Bertha Puls, took place. Since its founding, over 900 burials have taken place and several older 19th century graves have been relocated here as well."
It's a chilling irony - Did the farmer who sold his land ever imagine the first burial would be his own child?
Perhaps, or perhaps not. Certainly there is evidence of the harshness of country life back then in the number of children's graves at Lone Oak. It's painful to contemplate the rows of headstones in the family plots where a child was lost every year. Even with the inscription wearing off the oldest stones, there are many carved with small lambs, slowly succumbing to the weather.
Most of the children's headstones are simple, though one stands out as more elaborate. The grave of a small boy (four or five years old, the inscription was too worn to be sure) has a marble statue - perhaps a young Jesus or other saint - with a lamb at his side. The pedestal reads "watch until I come". A lot of care and expense must have been put into it. I wondered if his parents had been especially distraught over his loss; or perhaps it was that they had the financial means to express it when others had not. At the foot of the grave, a stone reads "baby love", a sentiment that seems very unusual to find in a German-American cemetery at that time.and place. I think the answer is probably both - the heartbreak is almost palpable in the stone itself:
Even if the means to decorate the grave of a lost child might have been scarce, the effort was made nonetheless. This infant girl's grave, surrounded by her cradle, overwhelms me every time I see it.
There is another reason it troubles me though. It's not only the feeling of the loss or the sense of passing time. This grave is in the west corner, isolated, no one with her last name nearby. There are only a few graves in the west corner and none seem to be related. It's not likely that these were the graves of paupers - they all have markers - and they are not the oldest graves in the cemetery. They just seem... odd, out of place, distressing somehow.
The west corner is intriguing, if a bit unsettling, and it's possible to get lost in thought there before you realize the sun is sinking and dusk is coming way too fast.
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