FALL CREEK BAPTIST CEMETERY, Oconee County, SC a.k.a. > Version: 3.0 Effective: 20-Jan-2010 Text File: C072.TXT Image Folder: C72 ******************************************************************************** It's believed that the usage of any original work submittals contained within these webpages such as articles, compiling, photographs or graphics, conform to Fair Use Doctrine & Copyright Guidelines. COPYRIGHT NOTE: (1.) Works published before 1923, are considered to be public- domain. (2.) Works published 1923-1977 without a copyright notice, are considered to be public-domain. (3.) Unpublished non-copyrighted works will have Author permission for public-domain. Facts, names, dates, events, places & data can not be copyrighted. Narration, compilations and creative works can be copyrighted. Copyright law in the U.S. does not protect facts or data, just the presentation of this data. REPRODUCING NOTICE: These electronic pages may only be reproduced for personal or 501(c) Not-For-Profit Society use. Use the following names, if, you would like to give any author compiling credit. AUTHORS: Paul M. Kankula-NN8NN & Gary L. Flynn-KE8FD *********************************************************************** 05-01-15 CEMETERY LOCATION: ------------------ > Latitude N x Longitude W CEMETERY HISTORY: ------------------------ > TOMBSTONE TRANSCRIPTION NOTES: ------------------------------ a. = age at death b. = date-of-birth d. = date-of-death h. = husband m. = married p. = parents w. = wife THE TRUE LEGEND OF LITTLE "POLLY" ROSE Contributed by Dot Jackson Once upon a time, generations of young children played in the yard of a now- fallen farmhouse on the Fall Creek Road, near Salem. As they chased "Red Rover" and rode their weary sapling ponies and played hide and seek amid the nearby woods, always, we are told, there was a caution: Do not step on Polly Rose. Polly" lay sleeping not far from the front door of the house, her bed marked by a small field stone. How long she had been there no one was sure - but a long, long time, for houses, and families, one century, then another, had grown up and grown old there, always deferring to that little marker. All that was "set in stone" about the Polly legend was the inscription "P R," scratched on the rock, as if with a nail or small chisel. But the story that passed down was that long ago, a family lived there who had a little girl, and the father loved that child and gave her such playthings as the hardscrabble life on a pioneer farm would afford. There was a big apple tree in the yard, way back then, and Polly, then 12 years old, loved to sit beneath (or sometimes even in) its branches, smelling the pale blossoms, eating its fruit. So her father took a length of rope, and notched a smooth board for a seat, and hung a swing from one of the tree's sturdier limbs. "Do not swing too high, now," he would say. But Polly Rose was daring. The sky was the limit. And one day, she fell. We cannot know the injury, but it was dire. Whether her death came at once, or whether she lingered before passing, the fall was fatal. And in grief, the father buried her not in some distant family ground, or a churchyard, but where her grave, marked with the small, up-ended stone, was always in his sight. So Polly's family, and another, and another - we do not know for sure how many - - lived and moved around that spot, with care. Her place was as assured, and respected, as the homes of wood set on stone that came in succession, after. The last family there was the Murphree clan, an upright and prominent household of farmers and landholders, who settled near the banks of Keowee River. It was through them that the "Polly" legend was carried, to the end. And it was from some of them, in latter days, that the protest came, when Oconee County decided, in the mid-1980s, to straighten the road to Fall Creek Landing, on Lake Keowee. The Murphree children had long since moved to their own grown-up homes on both sides of the river. But respectfully, they remembered "Polly Rose" - and it looked to them - rightly - that the survey markers had the new road headed right through her grave. Word of that unhappy matter came to the area newspapers, and this writer, then a reporter at the Greenville News, went out to look into it. The first stop was the old Murphree house, by then no longer lived in and engulfed in privet, surrounded by a thicket of young pines. Sure enough, though, there stood the field stone, out front, with its legendary inscription: "P R." Trees grew in what had to be the grave. Wistfully, a pink lady slipper bloomed between them, a tender touch of nature. Down the road toward the river lived Mrs. Blanche Murphree, a delightful keeper of local history. She told the story of Polly Rose, as it had been handed down. But, she said, she did not know, nor would anyone she could think of, how long the stone had been there. Or when Polly lived and died. The Murphrees had simply always honored it, she said. The next stop brought a little less friendly response. At the Oconee County administrative offices, the man who would approve, or could deny, the new course of the road was not so sentimental. "How do YOU know it's a little girl's grave?" he said. "It could just as well have been a mule!" Which, it was plain, he was surely willing to run over. When the story about the family's concern appeared in the paper, a curious thing happened. We had a call from a man who said that in the course of searching a deed for a nearby piece of property, he had just come across something odd. Back in 1804, a restriction had been placed on a tiny parcel of what would later be the Murphree tract, by the seller, a man named William Rose. The explanation, wrote Mr. Rose: he wished to prevent the disturbance, or removal, after he left the place, of the grave of his daughter, Patty Rose. Back to the Murphree tract again, this time with News photographer Alan Devorsey. We came equipped on this visit with a small shovel, to dig around the base of the stone. Lo and behold, several inches of topsoil down, there was more carving. A birth year, 1789. Death year, 1801. The child was 12 years old. As it evolved, the only hitch in these centuries of oral history was the confusion of the name, "Polly" in place of Patty. The age was right. Who knows about the story? Somehow we found that hard to doubt, or fault, so faithfully kept was that narrative of tragedy. When the road came through, as of course it did, we did not know about the bulldozing through the site until after it was over. What we were told, later that day, was that a funeral director had been present, and the grave opened, and its contents removed before the road building could proceed. A witness told us that the diggers had gone deep and had found nothing more than a thin layer of darkened soil in the clay, possibly the residue of a pine casket. Nothing else. The discolored soil, and the little stone, were moved to the cemetery of Fall Creek Baptist Church, nearby. Today, lake visitors and trucks trailing boats zoom blithely over the site of a heartbreak, and a legend, now well into its third century.