Warren’s Heritage: Native American History-Part 9

Those of us fortunate to have known Rebecca Poe will not be surprised at all by the fact that the depth and breadth of her research and documentation into local history was such that today we are still benefiting from and discovering her contributions. Today I would like to share a rediscovery, of sorts, unearthed by Assistant Archivist Judy Pfeiffer in the Laura Virginia Hale Archives. While combing through materials in preparation for the mounting of the Warren Heritage Society’s newest exhibit, entitled “Native Warren,” Judy came across an article printed almost two decades ago in the Warren Sentinel by Becky Poe during her long tenure at the Sentinel.

Concerning the old cemetery at Reliance, a community in the northwest corner of the county between Success and Confidence (no kidding), Becky documented the existence of a unique grave set in the middle of the cemetery for an unknown Native American who had lived in Reliance at the turn of the century.

The modern story began in the 1960s when a rural mail carrier learned through an elderly lady living on the Guard Hill portion his route that an Indian was buried in the Old Providence Church graveyard in Reliance. The woman had always heard that he was buried between two of her relatives, that he had lived in Reliance but had also lived in Rockland, and that no one remembered his name or how or when he died — just that he had been an Indian.

When the mail carrier brought this information to the attention of Gary Elswick, a local historian and trustee of the Old Providence Cemetery at the time, Elswick followed up on the lead and discovered a simple, unmarked, square concrete headstone located between the graves of two members of the Rosenberry family. No name or dates appeared on the headstone, but the two graves framing this marker were for folks who passed away between 1892 and 1907. This fact in addition to the material composition of the marker — concrete — leads to a general conclusion that the person interred beneath may have died around the late 1800s or early 1900s.

A man living in Reliance in the 1960s named Jesse James Vanderpool, also an American Indian, made with Els wick’s permission a cold-hammered copper plate with the image of a Native American man’s profile. The small plate was affixed to the gravestone and remains to this day a reminder of the man interred within the otherwise unmarked and undocumented grave.