This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Cemetery Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/BBB.2ACI/1965 Message Board Post: The Covington Journal Newspaper - Kentucky April 24, 1875 THE LOST GRAVE The Little Headstone that an Aged Mother Sought in Vain. [From the Detroit Free Press] If you have ever passed the old deserted graveyard on Russell street, near the House of Correction, you know that there is not a more lonely spot in Detroit. It is a score of years since any one was buried there. The fences lean in or out; the few trees are ragged in limb and trunk; the weather beaten headstones lean this way or that or have fallen down. The rich and the poor who sleep under the ragged sod have been dust for years, and if any of them left friends behind they are scattered now and are not here to fill up the sunken graves and plant a flower to take the gloom away. The other day people saw an old woman wandering through the graveyard, brushing the moss from some of the headstones to look at the letters, and studying long over the quaint characters carved into others. By and by she crossed the street and sat down on the steps of a cottage, and when people saw how old and feeble she was, and that her eyes were full of tears, they pitied her. She could not answer at first, but by and by she told them that she had come hundreds of miles to take a last look at a grave which she knew must be in the yard, but which she could not find. Half a century ago she buried a child there, and all through the long, long years, though moving here and there, her mother's heart had not forgotten the dead. Old now, her steps feeble and her locks gray, and feeling that she had but little longer to remain on earth, she had come clear across the State alone to have a last look at the little grave. Years had gone by, but she thought she could walk right to the spot, and there was half a hope in her heart that strangers' hands might have kept the headstone white and the grave as when she last saw it. She found the old yard cut up by streets, the city all around and beyond, and of the hundreds of mounds and headstones which she once saw, but a score or so were left. She sought among the leaning headstones, and she stood under the dying willows and searched the field for the small stone which bore the words "Our Willie". Fifty years since the little body was lowered into its grave! Half a century since the headstone was placed to mark the spot! And yet her mothers heart brought her back in her old age, with the hope that her tears might fall upon the little grave, obliterated and passed from sight forever. It was sad enough to see tears falling down her wrinkled cheeks, and to know that her old heart was aching with disappointment, and men spoke kind words to her, and women wiped their eyes in sympathy. Looking through her tears at the bleak and lonely field, its loneliness relieved and yet made more lonely by the timeworn headstones and the clumps of briars, no wonder that the poor old woman felt it in her heart and had to sob out: "I'm afraid, I can't find him in Heaven. Heaven's so large."