Cemeteries are full of stories, and Abby Burnett has stories about many of the cemeteries in Arkansas. Sunday afternoon, she'll discuss her new book, Though Silent They Speak: Arkansas Gravestones and Graveyards, at the Fayetteville Public Library. This week, Abby came to the Carver Center for Public Radio. Much of our conversation will be on a future show. Here, though, is a sample from her visit as she discusses what we might find written on a tombstone.
Burnett: When it comes to a poem, you can understand that that's mourning. You've lost children. You're trying to reconcile. You're trying to make sense out of a death. "God needed another angel" — that sort of thing. Especially a younger one, especially a family that's had a lot of losses. They're trying to come to terms with this. But when you get a piece of information, like the person's weight, or their dying words, or that they were killed — if they were killed by someone and the family did not get justice — I know of at least four stones that name a murderer because that person never paid for their crime. And then at the other extreme, the flip side is you have stones that are lying to us. They are telling us absolute whoppers.
Kellams: Really?
Burnett: And I love those. It comes down to pride. Family pride. You just don't want the world to know what your son or your husband or your family member did — or you don't believe it. So you say on their stone that they were murdered, that there was a conspiracy to kill them. John Pointer actually murdered his two traveling companions and was eventually hanged by Judge Parker's marshals. He was convicted. There was absolute proof that he had killed these two men. He was found wearing their clothing, carrying one of their pocket watches. But when he died, John Pointer's father, who had paid to get his son out of trouble over incident after incident, put on his son's stone: "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." Because John Pointer insisted that they had died because they were trying to kill each other, and he had tried to stop them — which was not true. But his father insisted that his son had nobly died trying to save his friends.
Kellams: So for you as a researcher and historian, do you know the story of John Pointer first, and then find the tombstone?
Burnett: In John Pointer's case, he's pretty well known. There's a book on all the people who were hanged in Judge Parker's court. So that story is out there. I don't think I even knew that John Pointer's stone said "Greater love hath no man than this" until after I'd researched him, because I thought he was interesting — and then found that, and it all kind of came together. In some weird way, his father over time wins, because most of us will walk by that and think, oh, whoever this person was, they gave their life in an ultimate sacrifice.
Kellams: Yes. And you can argue whether that matters a century later or not.
Burnett: It's used for soldiers a lot. "Greater love hath no man than this. He laid down his life." And it's very noble in those cases. In the case of John Pointer — the doctor in Helena that was buried under a statue of an Irish Setter, his stone says that cowards conspired to kill him. This was Dr. Moore. Most likely that marker was bought by Moore's parents. Moore was a known alcoholic with a violent temper and people were afraid of him. In fact, it was said when he died that he had been involved in a number of scrapes over the years — and those scrapes were not defined. The only one I could find was that he had killed one of his own patients, shot him point blank in the gut with a shotgun after the two argued over politics, and was eventually acquitted. But when Dr. Moore was drinking, he was a terror and everyone was afraid of him. And so when he was killed by a fellow doctor, it was as he was reaching for his gun. The other doctor also went about armed and protected himself, and it was found to be self-defense.
Kellams: When you speak at the library, I hope I haven't taken all the stories that you're going to use.
Burnett: Well, first of all, the book is full of stories. I was trying to think of what stories I could tell in my presentation that would give people a taste of the book. It's sort of like saying, what's your favorite child? I can't choose favorites, but I am going to try to boil it down to three stories. I'm going to talk a little bit about the book in general, but three stories: one will be about a cemetery, one will be about a symbol, and one will be about a stone — a stone that's unusual and has a great inscription and a great backstory, and a symbol that you don't see just everywhere, but when you do, it has a special meaning.
My story about a cemetery is going to answer the question of what is the oldest one in Arkansas, which was the subject I dreaded the most when I started this book — and I ended up loving the most and almost had trouble stopping. That research went in so many different directions. I ended up learning about the lost city of Napoleon. Underwater. Complete. And Mark Twain writes about it. When the steamboats started going up and down the Mississippi River, if a captain had passengers who died on board — you picked up people in New Orleans, there's an epidemic raging, 12 passengers die aboard your ship — what do you do with them? You don't take them to their destination. You've got to offload them. Where did riverboat captains bury their dead? The Napoleon Cemetery was one location because it was sandy soil and you could dig graves in a hurry. The wood lots, where they were taking on firewood for the boilers, were also places where they buried the dead.
The whole business of that early cemetery — how it's now an island, how coffins washed out of it during the big floods and were found downstream, and some were said to have come from the Napoleon graveyard. Napoleon being this first one, with early St. Louis historians saying, yes, Pierre Laclède, our founder, is buried there — because one of Pierre Laclède's children was shown the spot by the boatmen who had buried the father. And the stones that are still there, which are very few because they've been swept away — there's verification that there are stones there. All these little parts — I'm going to have to boil that subject down a lot. But the whole question of what is Arkansas's oldest European cemetery, how do we prove it, what are the ones that are claiming to be that aren't — I'm going to try to tell the story.
Abby Burnett will talk about her book, Though Silent They Speak: Arkansas Gravestones and Graveyards, at the Fayetteville Public Library on Sunday afternoon, beginning at 2. The talk is free and open to the public. Much more from our conversation — it turns out we share some favorite gravestones in Arkansas — on a future Ozarks at Large.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
