I met my friend Sue through Sally, who works at the cemetery in town. Sue often walks her dogs there in the morning and noticed a strange marker (pictured):
"IN
MEMORY
OF
ROBERT -
HANNAH
WARBURTON
AND THERE
TWO CHILDREN
PETER, BESSIE
WHO DROWNED
IN FIDDLER
POND MAY
21 - 1882"
MEMORY
OF
ROBERT -
HANNAH
WARBURTON
AND THERE
TWO CHILDREN
PETER, BESSIE
WHO DROWNED
IN FIDDLER
POND MAY
21 - 1882"
Sally explained that the family died accidentally, and Sue loaned me a history of the town, which confirms the details: "A resident who came from England, Robert Warburton, along with his wife and 2 children, drove a horse and wagon to Eustis one day in 1882. Either on the way or coming back the horse, thirsty for refreshment, ran to a small lake, Fiddler's Pond, just north of Mount Dora. But the horse slipped on the bank, plunged into the water, pulled the wagon after him, and the entire family drowned. This event is memorialized in one of the oldest monuments in Pine Forest Cemetery." Sue took me to see the stone several months ago (along with the nesting owls), but it was too overcast for a good photograph. Sally kindly e-mailed this one to me yesterday. And always on the lookout for weird news parallels, I had made a note of a passing bicyclist in Fort Worth, Texas, who stopped to rescue a drowning woman and her 7-year-old daughter from the Trinity River last summer.
It's funny to think that's one of the oldest gravestones there. I'm from Boston, so obviously there's a wealth of gravestones here that are much, much older. I guess I've been taking it for granted! Early American gravestone art is truly beautiful.
ReplyDeleteHello! Robert and Hannah Warburton were my great great grandparents. There were 3 children that were not involved Christopher(my great grandfather), Edith Warburton Binns, and Harry Francis. I visited December of 2012 and researched at the local library. They can not document that the family was actually buried there and that the headstone was to memorialize the family at a later date.
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