Judgment Day
This undated story
was written by Mrs. J. E. Balentine following an
interview with Thomas
E. Barrett, who described the tragic
death of his mother, Georgia Odella Barrett in 1893
and his young brother, Nay, who is also buried here.
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“Did you know that a woman was killed on your land?”
“Really! What happened? Was she murdered? Did they dig up her body?” What mystery, excitement, adventure, lay in
the tale of this small parcel of land we’d moved to in the eastern part
of
“Tell me more.”
Only to hear , “I
don’t know but I’ve heard that all my life.”
Later I asked several old timers. “Yes, that’s true.” None could remember except a woman was killed
there.
Early one morning in the summer of 1967,
two elderly couples drove up and a man in his seventies got out of a car. He knocked at the door of our farmhouse.
“Would you mind if I walked around and
looked at the old place here? You see my
father built that old storm cellar below your barn ….Did you know that my
mother was killed here?”
Hastily I told him I would be delighted
to have him go over the place if he would but wait until I called the family so
everyone could go and hear his story.
God bless that dear little man for coming.
We journeyed with him back through time
and space to 1893 when his father, Robert E. Lee Barrett, a stone cutter, had
built the strong rock cellar.
Laughingly his father had told them as he
built it, that it would last until Judgment Day.
Judgment Day came sooner than was
anticipated. For his little brother,
Nay, attracted by pills given him when he was sick, saw a full bottle later
upon Grandfather’s mantle above the fireplace.
He got a chair, climbed up, took the pills, hid, and had eaten them all
when they found him.
How they grieved over little brother’s
death.
As we walked down through our pasture, he
continued, “It
was right about here, where our old house stood. Mother, a young woman of twenty-four, had
just finished cooking dinner. She took
me, a little four year old boy by the hand.
Strange, it seems only yesterday.
We walked right up through here where my father was quarrying rocks.”
We, silently, trudged along in our
pasture straining to hear his words on this hot August morning.
“Mother and I stopped about here. She was holding my hand. Then she told Father to come to dinner.
About that time the guywire,
which held the hoist that lifted the rocks, snapped. Mother was knocked down and pinned to the
ground.”
Time had ceased, as we relived the actual
moment of horror and sorrow with this little lost boy of four, who had one
moment held security and the next become totally lost to oblivion.
His father worked vainly to free his
young wife and mother, whose life had already ceased from a broken neck.
Tears and sobs were as real as they must
have been earlier as eight grown ups and
three children sobbed with the little boy who had lost his mother so near the
Judgment Day Storm Cellar.