Caldwell County MO Archives History .....OLD STYLE WAGONS AND OLD CEMETERIES NEAR HAMILTON ON THE NORTH 
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Karen Walker khw4@yahoo.com September 3, 2008, 6:44 pm

OLD STYLE WAGONS AND OLD CEMETERIES NEAR HAMILTON ON THE NORTH
	Narrator:  Frank Stewart, 78, of Hamilton, Missouri

     Frank Stewart, a retired farmer lived as a youth three miles north of 
Hamilton near the Daviess County line.  He knows much about the old graveyards 
and burial places in that vicinity and also is acquainted with old style 
wagons.  
     He recalled seeing a few Conastoga wagons pass the farm in the sixties 
when he was young, but he knew the old style type without knowing the name.  
He said they were boat shaped, high back and front.  But the wagon used here 
in the sixties and early seventies was the stiff tongued wagon, the rear end 
of the tongue absolutely immoveable without the several joints between the 
tongue and the wagon that mark the present limber tongued wagon.  The front of 
the tongue was very loosely attached to the horse.  The horse wore no yoke and 
the tongue was attached to the chest girth by chains nearly a yard long, yoke-
chains.  If the front wheels of a wagon went in a rut, up flew the tongue and 
hit the horse in the nose.
     Mr. Stewart said that men used to drink whiskey heavily before going into 
the woods and deep weeds for "whiskey killed the poison of a snake bite."
     There were many private burial places near his fathers home.  On the farm 
known as the Harve Bainter place or old Lewis farm north of town, two slaves 
were buried north of the house at a gateway to a pasture.  You still had to 
drive over the mounds in 1865 to get into the pasture.  On the old Charley 
Morton farm the site of several unmarked graves is known.  Once they were said 
to have been fenced in, but the fence fell down and now people farm over 
them.  Charley Morton moved his dead from there.  On the old James place 
stands a lone slab stating the name of a girl and giving her age as eighteen; 
it is very old.  In the Sell graveyard over in Daviess County near Marrowbone 
Creek Bridge are said to be forty eight graves and fifteen years ago but one 
stone was left.  The Whitt graveyard in Daviess county toward Honey Creek 
received many early Hamilton dead.  It existed in the sixties.
     The Singleton graveyard four miles north on the Gallatin road lies in the 
timber.  The stones which are left lie flat among the trees.  Hamilton people 
were often taken there in the time between the founding of the town and the 
start of our first cemetery (Rohrbough) in 1868.  When that cemetery was 
started, some of these bodies were moved to Hamilton, as the Penney boy, 
originally there but now in the Highland Cemetery (two removals); the Thornton 
child (Jamie's Uncle who died 1866) was first buried in Singleton.  Singleton 
graveyard started in the early sixties and was on the Singleton farm, later 
the Prouty farm.  The Singleton family used to be well known here.  A 
Richardson girls married a Singleton and one of their sons Otis Singleton was 
for years a Government printer in Washington D.C.
     McCrary cemetery was started almost one hundred years ago, when the 
original McCrary died of typhoid fever ninety nine (99) years ago and a burial 
plot was begun on the McCrary family land.  It now lies in the timber in South 
Daviess County near the county line.  Hamilton People continued to bury there 
even after our town cemeteries started, because their people lay there.


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