This large base of a monument was in place. I saw parts of the top but none with the inscription. It is likely to be buried there in the brush somewhere.
This blurry image made before the dusk of the evening fell shows the scattered box tombs. If this cemetery were as it used to be from this photo one could see rows of box tombs and a couple of other types of tombs.
Photo was taken while standing on the wall of the cemetery shooting north east. This is as close as you can get to a credible area photo.
These are the corner post of a certain type box tomb. The other parts including that with the inscription is probably below there sunken below the debris and soil surface.
One of the piles of trash that beset this old graveyard including old glass bottles and cans etc. It has been a cast-a-way place for rubbish in the past though I saw no fresh dumps.
This blurry photo was taken of the Cornelia Mayes memorial beside the Ellen Leonard memorial standing tall in the right of the photo. The other parts seen are the broken scraps of the Cornelia Mayes memorial. This my folks is the work of vandals. I can tell by looking at the parts this damage occurred more than about 50 years ago. Most likely they were ignorant enough to believe there was treasure in these box tombs. The only thing they found in them was empty space, Poison Ivy, Black Widow Spiders, Snakes and other harmful things of nature ready to pounce upon the intruder. The settlers had better sense than to put valuables in a box tomb. For one thing they could not get the top up without special equipment without damaging the tomb. Most of them had more respect for the dead than that. Anything put in a box tomb could not be kept dry. With these type tombs the water runs into them all the time. The culprits that inflict this kind of damage mostly came from 14 to 19 year old boys with mental disorders and sadly there are lots of them around even today.
Just to show you how tombs sink into the ground and are lost what we see in the center of the photo is the top of a box tomb. I believe it to be for part of the tomb of the progenitor David Looney just based on where it has fallen. While there is no inscription on what we see the parts with the inscription are somewhere nearby just below the surface in the soil, probably on a side of the tomb.
Photo and information by Wayne Austin 24 Feb 2009, late evening around 5:00 PM.
