[Farmer Dean]

Note the dates on the headstones.Scary how many people died from the flu epidemic.

[Publius]

In my horseback riding days (1987-92) I once went on a trail ride with a group of people through the abandoned coal mining town of Franklin in King County, Washington. The town is long gone, but at one point we rode through a grove of trees that were punctuated with lumps of white stone.

A closer look showed that we were riding through Franklin's cemetery. The forest had completely overgrown the graveyard, leaving little lumps of headstone sitting by trees. The names on the stones were Italian, and a huge number of them died in 1910 from cholera. It must have been a hard life.

[digger48]

Several cemeteries near me have multiple little headstones for the small children that died within just a 2-3 year timespan.

Things were brutal here during the early years of the settlements.

The natives that lived here migrated back and forth to higher ground every year, since so much of this area was underwater in the mid 1800’s.

Prime farmground though, once drained.