In today's Chronicle-Telegram from Elyria, OH is yet another article on Hattie Pratt: Story from the Sunday, March 27, 2005 Edition of the Chronicle Telegram Hattie Pratt’s death: solved Shawn Foucher The Chronicle-Telegram HUNTINGTON — It was late October, 1862. The leaves would be in the height of their color transformation, but some Lorain County boys would never see it; they were in southern states battling in the Civil War. And at the Huntington Township home of Benjamin Pratt, his 3-year-old daughter — Hattie Adele Pratt, subject of the Archibald Willard painting “Blue Girl” — was expelling the last painful breaths of her brief life on her father’s 42-acre farm. Two days ago, the cause of Hattie’s death was still a mystery to most people, but thanks to members of the Lorain County genealogical community, the cause is a mystery no more. On Thursday afternoon, while Huntington resident Dan Dailey was digging a posthole in the dirt floor of his state Route 58 barn, he plucked Hattie's marble tombstone from beneath a foot of wet earth. The county coroner is uncertain whether the site in Dailey's barn is Hattie's actual grave, and a 6-foot obelisk looming over a plot of earth in nearby Huntington Cemetery further mystifies the matter. The obelisk is inscribed with the names of four Pratt family members — Benjamin Pratt, Alta Pratt, Jerome Pratt and Hattie A. Pratt — but cemetery records do not confirm whether any bodies were actually buried in the small plot. It’s possible that the Pratt family erected the obelisk in the cemetery to ensure they were included in the town’s history, according to Tim Simonson, a board member of the Wellington Historical Society. While the site of Hattie’s tiny body may remain a mystery until Dailey and his family opt to excavate their barn, Dailey says he’s not moving ahead until he’s able to contact a Pratt family member who lives in Pennsylvania. When intrepid researchers from the Lorain County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society got wind of Dailey’s discovery, however, they leapt at the opportunity to feed their insatiable appetites for historical discovery. Lorain County birth records only date back to 1867 and newspaper items would rarely show up in an online search engine, but that didn’t stop Margaret Cheney, of Lorain, from digging a little deeper. “The genealogy community in Lorain County is a very connected group of people,” Cheney said. “Usually we help each other find the roots we’re looking for.” After reading an article in The Chronicle-Telegram on Friday, Nancy Meyers, a close friend of Cheney’s who has researched family histories for more than 40 years, recalled a book in her personal library: “Non-military Death notices from Lorain County News, 1860 to 1867,” compiled and published by Glenn A. Carruthers, formerly of Oberlin. Carruthers worked on the book as a personal project, Meyers said. “There were publications out long before Ohio records began,” Meyers said. “Lorain County News was an Oberlin newspaper; it listed all non-military deaths at the time.” On one page of the book is a listing of the death of the 3-year-old daughter of Benjamin Pratt. Hattie Adele Pratt died of diphtheria on Oct. 21, 1862.