The Lone Grave at Paroquet Springs

The following excerpt is taken from an article transcribed by Leland Johnson from The Courier-Journal, 7 Feb 1909. It is presented here with his kind permission. The photo is scanned from microfilm which accounts for its poor quality. You may read the entire article on another page.

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A visit to Paroquet Springs is not complete unless the visitor goes to the "Lone Grave," a romantic spot on the east side of the grove. The history of the lone mound hidden away among the trees and covered with its green mantle of ivy is pathetic and tragic. The writer heard the story from Judge William R. Thompson, who was a young man when the affair occurred, and who died in 1894. It is short and simple and will bear telling.

In 1834 a young man came from New York to the Springs to spend the summer, and soon after his arrival was introduced to a young woman from Mississippi, who was there with her widowed mother to spend the season. The couple seemed to have been fashioned by fate for each other. They were young, wealthy, and of aristocratic lineage, both were highly educated and gifted in music and conversation. She was a typical Southern beauty of the brunette type, of majestic figure, and her suitors were legion. He was handsome, of fine athletic form, and a social lion. It seemed to be a case of love at first sight. They became constant and inseparable companions. In the ballroom, on the river, at the musicales, or strolling beneath the boughs of the great trees, they were together unmindful of all else. Persistently and ardently he pressed his suit through the fleeting summer hours, and before the summer had waned he had won her heart.

In the fall they separated, but with the understanding that in the early winter he was to make her his wife, and take her to his Eastern home. Believing in his love and manhood, she went back to her Southern home and waited for him, but he never came, and at last, broken-hearted and disgraced, she died, after exacting from her faithful and grief-stricken old mother a promise that her body should be brought back to Paroquet Springs and buried beneath the tree under which she first met her unfaithful lover. True to her promise, her mother had the body of her unfortunate daughter conveyed to Paroquet and laid away where her last and happiest summer had been spent; and there she sleeps today beneath the mighty monarchs of the forest that keep their ceaseless vigils above her lonely tomb.

The iron fence which surrounds the grave was placed there when the grave was made about seventy-four years ago and has never been painted or cared for; but time has spared it from the touch of his destroying hand, and it is almost as good today as in 1835, when it was placed there by the faithful mother to guard the grave of her child. No message ever came back from the mother, and as time passed on the name of the unfortunate girl was forgotten. No stone is there to tell her name; but from sire to son and mother to daughter he sad story has been handed down. Nor does the story contain the name of the man who wrecked the poor girl's life.

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Andrea McDowell's article, which appeared in the Filson Club Quarterly, is probably the best description of Paroquet Springs in general, although it does not touch on the lone grave. Leland Johnson also excerpted several short articles on the springs from the CJ which are transcribed on another page.

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This is a work in progress. The web page is copyright 2007 by Charles Hartley, Shepherdsville KY. All rights are reserved.

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