Baby Girl (Close Up) UNKNOWN

Legends abound over girl’s grave
By Jeanni Brosius This article was published June 19, 2011 at 4:33 a.m.

JUDSONIA — Along the side of U.S. 67/167 where it merges into U.S. 157 in Judsonia is a lone grave surrounded by a chain‐link fence. The headstone’s inscription is “The Unknown Baby Girl: In death she belongs to all of us.”
Ask anyone between Searcy and Bald Knob about the baby girl who is buried there, and most of them will say they’ve seen the grave, but they don’t know the story.
Well, the true story may have died with those directly involved, but the little girl’s grave is a reminder to passersby of a life lost.
“My dad’s cousin (Dee Hopper) used to own that ground,” Donnie Schmidt said. “I was 8 when I first heard the story, and my dad had repeated it several times.”
Schmidt is the area maintenance supervisor for the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, and his team is responsible for maintaining the little grave.
The four‐lane highway went through that part of White County in 1976, and Schmidt said that was the same year he began working for the Highway Department. Schmidt said he believes the headstone was placed there by the department before the completion of that stretch of highway. However, the White County Historical Society claims the concrete headstone was designed and constructed by someone named Louis Harris.

3/6/2017 JUDSONIA: Legends abound over girl’s grave
http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2011/jun/19/legends­abound­over­girls­grave­20110619/ 2/3

“My dad told [the Highway Department] about the grave, and they were careful not to put the highway over it,” said Vera Roach, whose family once owned the land. “The family [of the little girl] lived in the old house that used to be there, and the family buried her out there by the tree.”
The tree still stands over the grave.
Roach said she didn’t know a lot about the girl or the events leading to her death, other than the stories her father told. She recalled playing around the grave when she was a child, but she said there was not much evidence that it was a grave. She and her siblings placed rocks around the burial site to mark it.
“We just knew it was there,” she said. “We would play around the grave and pretend we were having a funeral for her.”
There are variations of how the little girl died.
“The story I was told was that the family was strawberry pickers, and she had fallen out of her [highchair] onto a fork,” Schmidt said.
That is similar to the story Roach told, except instead of a fork, it was a knife that she had taken from the table.
But Bald Knob Mayor Doyle Wallace heard another story.
“I have stopped there myself and heard different stories,” Wallace said. “I heard a wagon train came through, and a little girl died and they had to bury her.”
According to White County Historical Society records, the child was about 2 years old, and she died around 1890 or 1891. Because the girl’s family was poor, neighbors and friends placed her in a crude casket and buried her.
An editorial published in the July 14, 1972, issue of the White County Record states, “Even with the additional data revealed in today’s Record columns, the child remains unknown. In a sense, then, she belongs to all of us ‐ to parents who can translate her early death into the worst of their fears; to those who are without children; to those who remember when their own offspring were toddlers; and to each and every one of us who holds fast to our earliest memories of those happy days when we, too, gazed around in wonder at a world that was much too big for us.”

Submitted by;
Leroy Blair
lblblair74@gmail.com

Contributed on 5/27/20 by hawkinsdonna48
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Record #: 1320580

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