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Vietnam veterans clean up settlers' final resting
place
By Bill Whitaker
Taylor County Veterans Service Officer Nebra Peters wore a
cap marked "parade official" last Saturday, but she
was miles from the West Texas Fair & Rodeo Parade then under
way.
Nebra, together with some of her staff plus members of local
veterans groups, led her own procession that morning. In a wonderfully
charitable act, the bunch traveled to Eagle Colony Cemetery south
of town and began work with riding mowers, axes and trimmers,
clearing waist-high weeds from the forgotten graves of equally
forgotten early-day settlers.
The morning went slower than expected, too, because the cemetery
turned out to be a lot less "little" than Nebra or anyone
else figured. Also, temperatures quickly climbed into the broiling
zone.
But none of the 15 or so people involved in the cemetery work
fled the place.
"A resting place like this should be a place of honor,"
50-year-old former Marine Mike Hernandez remarked at one point.
"And this one really needed the work."
Nebra and her staffers put together the work detail after hearing
about the cemetery's poor condition from county commissioner Neil
Fry. Local veterans quickly signaled their willingness to help
out -- an offer Nebra wasn't about to turn down.
"That's what I like about guys," she joked. "They
know what to do!"
Of course, the veterans may have rethought their offer by mid-morning.
Tom Stone, 50, an Abilene Grunts Association member and, like
most of the men, a Vietnam vet, took one long look at the badly
neglected cemetery, then muttered: "Gonna need a bigger weed-eater."
FLAT OUT OF LUCK
The high spirits evident at Eagle Colony Cemetery Saturday
morning almost made one forget the gloomy history of Eagle Colony,
begun in 1878 with great optimism and fervent hope.
Miss Tommie Clark, the late Abilene High teacher who kept track
of the county's early history, said Eagle Colony was one of our
area's first settlements, composed largely of German Lutherans,
many still new to America.
They came mostly from parts of the Midwest, anxious to find,
as she put it, "cheap land, pleasant surroundings and glorious
opportunities."
Instead, they wound up in Taylor County, swindled by a land
promoter who took off with their money, leaving them high and
dry.
Eventually the sheriff came out from Buffalo Gap to repossess
some of the equipment, including the settlers' hardy Studebaker
wagons. Some of the settlers shrewdly resisted this by hiding
their wagons in a nearby creek bed.
Left largely penniless, the settlers' fortunes went from bad
to worse come winter. The bitter cold forced the Germans to boil
mesquite beans for coffee and burn buffalo chips for warmth. Although
area ranchers tried to help, many Eagle Colony children died from
the desperate conditions.
By spring, many settlers resolved to take what little was left
and return east. A few remained behind and even found a degree
of prosperity in Abilene, which sprouted up a few years later.
But the Eagle Colony settlement itself was regarded as pure
failure.
NARY A BEER CAN
For years afterward, only descendants of the settlement's hardiest
survivors and their mates were buried in the graveyard. The oldest
markers in the cemetery -- often for children -- are little more
than rocks. Judging from the newer stones, the cemetery saw little
use after the 1950s.
Bill Beam, who lives nearby and tried to maintain the cemetery
for a while, said he believes the last people buried in the cemetery
were his grandparents, both of whom died early this decade. Naturally
I asked why they didn't want to be buried in a cemetery that had
perpetual care.
"They didn't want anything real fancy," Bill said.
"They just wanted to be close to where they grew up."
Members of the Military Order of the Purple Heart, Vietnam
Veterans of America and Abilene Grunts Association expressed amazement
upon finding nary a beer can in the overgrown cemetery -- a rarity
in these times.
"Any other place," one veteran said, "there'd
be gobs of beer cans."
Virginia Choate, who is undergoing studies to be a master gardener
and decided to help at the cemetery out of friendship for Nebra
Peters, admitted she was reconsidering her friendship mid-morning.
Happily, she did not give up.
Asked what gardening wisdom she had for Eagle Colony Cemetery
(and after she had been stung by a wasp), she quipped: "Gasoline
and a match."
PLANT ME HERE
Robert Rubio, riding a mower with an American flag attached,
found it particularly difficult because the small rocks that marked
graves were themselves hidden by grass. He at last prevailed on
fellow veteran Bill Cowan to act as his point man, "just
like in Vietnam."
The veterans did get some personal satisfaction out of it,
especially when their efforts revealed markers from military men
of times gone by. They ranged from a rebel infantryman of Civil
War days who died Christmas Eve 1914 to an Air Force veteran shot
at home under mysterious circumstances in 1982.
In any case, the place looked a lot better after the veterans
were done.
"You know, I wouldn't mind being planted out here, if
they're still planting people," Bill Cowan remarked. "I
wonder who to see about putting my name down."
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Copyright ©1996 or
1997, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps. Publications
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