Grand Granite Grand

Tyler is a small, pretty city in east Texas. There’s a lot of roses grown around the area. If you buy a rose anywhere in America, there’s a good chance it either was grown in Tyler or was processed in Tyler. It has a beautiful public rose garden which you shouldn’t miss if you find yourself in the area, and hosts the fun Texas Rose Festival each year. It is known as the “Rose Capital of the Nation.” In 1985, the International Adopt-A-Highway movement originated in Tyler when the local Civitan chapter adopted 2 miles of U.S. Hwy 69. It is the home of at least 4 Miss Texas winners, a Miss America winner, Sandy Duncan, the actress, Dooley Wilson, famous for playing Sam in the movie Casablanca, Earl Campbell and numerous other professional athletes, musicians, actors, and Kelley Thompson, Playboy Playmate for the month of November, 2009.

Even though I was born and raised in and around Dallas, Texas, I’m not fond of cities. I try to stay away from cities. Too much traffic, too crowded. If I’m driving on a road wider than 2 lanes, then it’s because for some unavoidable reason I’m in a hurry or there isn't another way to get from here to there. Tyler is a city, but it is an exception to my rule. You see, my son and grandson live there. Plus there's some mighty good Bar-B-Que joints in Tyler so I go there as often as I can.

So why am I telling a story of Tyler? Because Tyler is also home to a story I like; a story about a person who was a little weird, a bit eccentric – right up my alley.

Madge Ward was a life-long player of the piano. She never obtained celebrity-hood during her 83 years, but she managed to make a good living taking her 1-woman show around the country to resorts, hotels, clubs and on cruise ships. She entertained the troops in World War II and when she wasn’t on tour, she taught children how to tickle the ivories. She had an interesting life, but relatively speaking, not that many people outside of her family really noticed or gave her a lot of thought.

Madge passed away on May 4, 1995 and was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery. Very soon after, lots of folks took note of her. As a matter of fact, she started a small war of words among the citizens of Tyler.

You see, a year before her death, she commissioned a Tyler memorial builder to design a gravestone that symbolized the love, the passion she had held with the piano her whole life. The result was the largest single-person monument in the cemetery; an 8-foot tall, 25-ton granite grand piano mausoleum, inside of which Madge will spend eternity. The price tag has never been revealed, but Madge told a few people she had saved for 35 years to afford it. Poor Madge never got to actually see it before being laid to rest in it. She saw pictures and drawings, but it was so big, the local maker couldn’t handle the job so it was actually cut outside the state and shipped to the cemetery shortly after her passing.

A good number of the movers and shakers in Tyler didn’t appreciate such a grand monument being in Tyler’s largest cemetery, which just happens to be the resting place for their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, the movers and shakers during Tyler’s earlier days. Seeing as how Madge had made her living as a ”B-list” entertainer didn’t help. But there was no law or even a cemetery rule against it and the grand granite Grand still remains.

Today, Rose Hill gets a lot of visitors, many of them stopping by to see the piano headstone of Madge Ward. Locals bring their out-of-town visitors to see it, people from around the country stop by, even tour buses cruise through and stop for their passengers to take pictures. Madge was an entertainer in life and, in Tyler, she’s still attracting an audience, even in death.

The Civil War Comes To Van Buren





Historic Downtown Van Buren is full 
of small stores now.

Arkansas' 19th largest city is Van Buren. Unless you are from Van Buren, or perhaps Sherwood, the state's 18th largest city, or Cabot, number 20, you probably didn't know that. And now that I've got the educational piece of this blog entry out of the way, I'll get on to more interesting stuff about Van Buren.

First settled in 1818 and known as Phillips Landing (Phillips being the last name of brothers who established a lumber yard in the area), the town acquired a post office and changed its name to Van Buren (after the Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren) in 1831. The town was incorporated on Christmas Eve, 1842. Almost exactly 20 years later, downtown Van Buren became the site of a rather strange Civil War battle.

Many of the buildings survive from the 1800's.

Three weeks before the Battle of Van Buren was fought, The Confederates suffered a loss in the battle of Prairie Grove, north of the town. Outnumbered 2 - 1, demoralized by the lack of adequate equipment, food, medicine, and clothes and having not been paid in many months, the Rebels retreated to the northern outskirts of Van Buren. Many of the men were without shoes and a large number had to sleep under makeshift lean-to's constructed of sticks in the woods due to a severe lack of tents. Winter weather set in and with the lack of proper shelter, warm clothing, medicine, and not enough food, almost half of the 4,000 troops soon fell ill. When the weather cleared enough for travel, over 7,000 Federals traversed a mountain pass over the Ozarks and ran into a small detachment of Texas cavalry. The Texans put up a fight, but were soon overwhelmed. The surviving few retreated toward the rest of the Confederate troops in the town, but those men were in no condition to put up an effective defense and the fighting withdrawal soon became a full-on retreat right down Main Street.

The battle raged straight down Main Street.

What made this battle unusual is that in the majority of fights in other towns, the citizens were warned beforehand by one side or the other or they were aware of a battle that was coming their way hours or even days before it got there. The Battle of Van Buren happened so quickly that the citizens were caught completely by surprise. As the troops rode and ran through town, shooting at each other and engaging in mortal hand-to-hand combat, civilian men were caught sitting on benches trading news in front of stores, women in their bonnets were caught shopping and children stopped playing in the streets to stare at the fighting soldiers. Amazingly, not one civilian was seriously hurt during the running fight through the town.

The Confederates made their way to the river where they jumped on board a ferry and a number of steam boats. The Yankees got to the river as the last few boats were starting to pull away from the pier. The Rebels set 2 of the boats on fire to keep them from being captured. One boat was stranded on a sand bar and when musket fire and artillery disabled another one, exactly 100 southern troops were captured.

Over 500 Confederate soldiers are 
buried in Fairview Cemetery.

A 2-hour cannon duel commenced when from a hill in Fairview Cemetery, Union cannons fired across the river at the Confederates who had made it safely across and the southerners who brought up their own cannon, fired about 100 shells at the Yanks. Only 1 Northern soldier was killed and five were wounded in the shelling, but a number of houses around the cemetery were damaged, a civilian was killed and several more wounded. As night fell, the Yanks gathered up their wounded and dead and both sides withdrew from the battle. Left to repair itself and bury the Confederate dead was a now stunned and very quiet Van Buren.

Over 500 Southern soldiers are buried in a large corner of Fairview Cemetery. In a sad statement to the way of that awful war, over 400 of the headstones are marked simply, "Unknown Confederate Soldier."