A WALK THROUGH HISTORY AT ROSE HILL CEMETERY

~George Santayana- Spanish philosopher~

Royston, Georgia. July 4, 2006 One hundred and ninety years of history rest in a small, fenced-in family plot in Rose Hill Cemetery. I walked around the area yesterday and thought about it.

Joseph Middleton Bond has rested there since 1894, the year after the great financial panic of '93. Grover Cleveland was in charge of the country at that time, his second go-around as President.

J. M. Bond was born in 1809 in Elbert County, Georgia. That was the same year that Lincoln fellow was born in western Kentucky.

In 1831, when Andrew Jackson was stirring the pot to run all the Cherokee Indians out of Georgia, J. M. Bond married Lettie Herring. She was fifteen at the time, and by the time Jackson won a second term, she was a mother, at the age of sixteen.

Lettie is buried beside J. M. at Rose Hill. She too died in 1894, several months after his death.

A lot happened during the eighty-four years that J. M. lived, and much of it he probably didn't hear about until weeks or months later, if at all. The British burned Washington during the War of 1812 when he was five, but there was no CNN, or radio....not even a telegraph to flash the news. That wouldn't come until 1835.

Francis Scott Key wrote a poem about the war. He was right in the middle of it, a prisoner on a British warship while Baltimore was being bombarded. J. M. might never have heard the poem, or the song that emerged from it. They called it "The Star-Spangled Banner". It will be sung a lot today.

J. M. was in his late thirties when the next war came. That was a fight about land in the southwest, a place called Texas. It was called the "Mexican War", and we ended up with a whole passel of land, including California as well as Texas. Andy Jackson's protégé, James K. Polk, felt like God intended us to have it. He didn't have a Bible to back his claim, but he had a label. He called it "Manifest Destiny."

Politicians seem to always be able to hang neat labels on their "wars". Not sure what label Jackson put on stealing all the Cherokees' land.

The Mexicans still think we stole all that territory. With the immigration stink going on right now, you hear them talk about it a lot.

When J. M. Bond was fifty-two, that fellow Lincoln was the same age. He got elected President with forty percent of the vote, and without a Supreme Court decision. You can bet J. M. was not part of the forty percent.

Lincoln was not in favor of one man owning another. There was a big split in the country over that. It had been brewing for a long time. In fact, some fifteen years earlier, Baptists from the South got together in Augusta, Georgia, and split off from the rest of the Baptists because of it. We Baptists liked the idea of splitting up so much that we have been doing it ever since.

The South took a cue from the Baptists, and the "slave states" withdrew from the union when Lincoln won. Lincoln would have nothing of that, which started a big fight, the bloodiest the country would ever experience. J. M.'s future son-in-law, Daniel Franklin Johnson, who is buried across the way from J. M., joined the fight with a group called the "Georgia Sharpshooters". A black, iron CSA cross marks the foot of his grave.

After the war, Daniel Franklin Johnson came home and married J. M.'s daughter, Belle. This was a hard time for most folks in the South. They called it "reconstruction", but it was hardly that in the South. Lincoln was dead, and the Northern politicians made it hard on us down here.

Some time after the war, probably while Grant was President, J. M. Bond established a hotel in Franklin Springs, just northwest of Royston. Franklin Springs was a bustling resort area for awhile, but when the railroad came along in 1878, it took the high ground through Royston (bridges were expensive), bypassing Franklin Springs.

D. F. Johnson apparently learned a lot about the hotel business from his father-in-law. He built a hotel in Royston, right across the road from the depot. The only mode of inland transportation at the time (other than the railroad) depended on raw horsepower.

The hotel and Royston both prospered.

D. F. died in 1904, when Teddy Roosevelt was President. Roosevelt had just "rough-ridden" the tide of another small war to the top. They called it the "Spanish American" war, but some people called it the "Newspaper" war, an affair trumped up by the New York newspapers to boost circulation.

The phrase "yellow journalism" was coined during the newspaper wars because of the sensationalism and distortions. It's still going on.

D. F. died before the next war and before widespread use of several transforming inventions took hold; Belle, however, lived on until 1928, operating the Johnson Hotel, watching as the automobile and the telephone changed day-to-day life. She was probably too early for radio.

Belle, as well as her children, lived to hear about the next war. They called it the "World War" the "war to end all wars." Woodrow Wilson was President then. After the war, he thought he could get everybody together so we would stop fighting. It worked for a little while; however, twenty-five years later we had another "World War", so we had to put a "II" behind it. Sixty years later we still can't seem to get it right.

D. F. and Belle's daughter, Corinne, rests in an area near her parents, next to her husband, Frank Lee. Several more of Belle's daughters, and a son, are asleep nearby. They saw all this newfangled stuff come to pass.....telephone, automobile, radio, television.

The computer came later. They were blessed.

Corinne and Frank have two of their children next to them, Mabel Martin and Frank Lee, Jr. Frank, Jr. served in big war number II.

Two hundred and thirty years have gone by since 1776. The folks who rest here in Rose Hill lived through almost two hundred of them, and all but four of the presidents, from Madison to Clinton.

Independence Day, 2006. There will be a lot of flag waving, fireworks, parades, political posturing. It goes with the day.

But, in the end, what have we learned? Sometimes, I think, a lot. Then, at other times, I think, not much.....at least not enough.

Ó2006        Dave Nelson