Trammel’s Trace’s Wagon Train Baby
The Indians went to live on the reservations, Texas became the 28th state, and the Civil War was over. Many eyes and hearts turned to Texas.
People came from most every state and some foreign countries. One of the paths they traveled was Trammel’s Trace, sometimes described as an early Indian trail and sometimes as a horse path, was named after Nicholas Trammel, who is supposed to have run stolen horses from Arkansas to Texas as early as 1813.
And who from 1820 to 1830 operated a ferry on the Old San Antonio Road crossing at the Trinity River. In terms of present place names, the trail began at the mouth of Cadron Creek on the Arkansas River (near Conway) and ran via Hot Springs to Fulton on the Red River. From Fulton it continues south-westward across Bowie County, Texas, to the Epperson’s Ferry crossing on Sulphur River, thence westward to the site of the old Indian village near present Hughes Springs, Texas.
From there the Trace turned southeast to cross Cypress Bayou two miles west of Jefferson, made an arc around the later site of Marshall to the eastward and turned southwest again to cross the Sabine River north of Tatum and follow part of the boundary line between Panola and Rusk Counties and then turned south to Nacogdoches.
In 1859 one checkpoint noted 100 wagons had passed in one day loaded with horses, cows, pigs, chickens, and even nine cashmere goats. Travel in this new land was slow, and problems arose, as they will.
Sometime between 1848 and 1876, a small group of wagons traveling Trammel Trace had cause to stop. This was near the Hughes Springs turning point, close to the old Choctaw Indian Village. A small girl of about four or five belonging in the group was gravely ill. It was impossible to save her life, even though a farmer living in this area brought the local doctor to care for the child.
Permission was given for burial on the farmer’s land, by the side of the road. A coffin was made, and the parents had to bid their daughter good-bye, promising to return after they were settled to claim the corpse and take it to their new home.
They did come back in about a year but did not take the child until they returned once again after five years. When the body was exhumed, they found that the child’s body was petrified, and her hair had grown so long that it wrapped around the casket.
The mother refused to take the body from the grave she had grown accustomed to, and the child was reburied.
The story of the child’s exhumation and the unusual findings traveled near and far. A barker for a sideshow tried to buy the body from both the parents and the landowners, who refused.
Today, the little grave is marked with only a flat jagged rock. No name plate memorializes the girl-only the words “Wagon Train Baby 1800s.”
Legend says it could mark an empty grave, if grave robbers, indeed, stole the petrified body.
The grave, empty or not, is not alone today. It is the oldest grave in the Hargiss Cemetery.
A few graves there belong to the Day family: Fanny Day, 1875-1917, and her husband F.S. Day, 1869-1938, and World War II Veteran John D. Day, Texas, rest in the cemetery. Many Hargiss family members also are buried there, but some of their graves have no headstones.
Some graves have only large rocks at the head and foot. The space occupied by these graves composes a small clearing where weeds and briers make a tight ground cover. Many graves may be hidden in those weeds.
Shortly after the turn of the century, a wagon train traveling on the Trammel Trace brought my own father to Texas. A small group of wagons from Missouri and Arkansas traveled together for protection.
William L. Waggener, along with his parents, William Pitt Waggener and Amanda Susan Courtney, and his brothers, Benjamin and Charlie made the trip, leaving his only sister, Anna Ora Belle Mooney, back in Missouri.
The family stopped in Pittsburg for a while. My father moved to Upshur County, on the Cherokee Trace, and when he and my mother, Annie Morgan, were married, they lived in Nacogdoches, where the two traces met Their first child, a little girl, died at the age of 19 months, and was buried under three cedar trees in a cemetery near Nacogdoches.
Today we cannot find her grave, and this adds to the air of mystery about the trace.
I wonder if the descendants of the little wagon train baby have tried to find her grave. History tells of so many graves beside so many trails.
The baby at Hughes Springs has had a slight acknowledgment: someone recently placed the stone, and flowers have been planted near her grave.
I hope someone has been as kind to my little sister. The Hargiss Cemetery is located off Highway 49 at Veal Switch near Hughes Springs. Turn on Morris County Road 4114 east, and travel 1.2 miles to Morris County 2115, turn north and travel a short distance. The cemetery is on the left.