Then, one dreary night in April 1904, Robert Musgrove was killed in a head-on collision with another train between Memphis and Amory.
A man on horseback brought the sad news to his family in northern Fayette County.
Arrangements were made to hold Robert Musgrove’s funeral services at Musgrove Chapel, the church where he had worshipped in childhood. His body was sent by train from Memphis to Winfield, the nearest rail point to Musgrove Chapel. This was before the days of automobiles, so a caravan of wagons met the funeral train at Winfield to transport Robert’s body and the contingent of his friends who accompanied it out to Musgrove Chapel.
Robert’s boyhood friends drove some of those wagons. As they waited at the Winfield station for the train to arrive, they talked about Robert, their memories of their good times together.
“Hard to believe Robert is dead,” they said again and again “But if he had to die, it’s good to know he died at the throttle of his train. He would have wanted it that way.”
When the train pulled into the station, the friends walked quietly to the baggage car, lifted Robert’s coffin out, and placed it in the lead wagon. Then they spoke to Robert’s railroad friends who had come to his funeral and made sure that these visitors were comfortably seated in the wagon for the ride in the country. Among the mourners who came on that train was the young woman to whom Robert had been engaged. She rode to the church in the wagon driven by W. L. Moss.
“She was a beautiful young woman. So sad,” he recalled years later. “I’ll never forget how she looked all dressed in black.”
Other people who met her remember thinking how tragic that she should be forced to wear the doleful black of mourning instead of the joyous white of a wedding dress.
The small chapel was filled to overflowing that afternoon with people who cared about Robert Musgrove and who grieved over his death. The alter area of the chapel was crowded with flowers, formal floral arrangements from the city mixed with fresh blossoms (jonquils, pear blossoms, yellow forsythias, and such) cut from Fayette County yards.
The preacher used the Methodist ritual for the burial of the dead, and he read the Twenty-Third Psalm and John 14:1, “Let not your heart be troubled . . .” and he talked about how life is like a railroad. The choir sang “In the Sweet By and By” and “When They Ring the Golden Bells.”
Then all the people went out into the graveyard with the preacher leading the way and the pallbearers walking slowly and solemnly behind him.
After the pallbearers had lowered the coffin into the grave and the preacher had said the final words and the grave had been filled, most of the people left the graveyard and started home. They grieved about Robert, but there were chores to do.The scattering of folks who loitered after the burial saw Robert’s sweetheart kneel beside the fresh grave. She folded her hands and bowed her head, and she remained motionless in that attitude of prayer for several minutes. As she arose, people close by heard her whisper, “Robert, I’ll never leave you.”
Nobody now remembers her name, but nobody who witnessed the sad drama ever forgot how she knelt at the grave or her whispered promise of eternal love.
Several months after Robert’s death, his family had an impressive granite marker erected at his grave, an eight-foot obelisk. Robert would have liked it.
In the years that followed, worshippers at Musgrove chapel and families who lived nearby noticed that periodically Robert Musgrove’s grave was cleared of weeds and fallen twigs, and fresh flowers were on his grave.
The flowers were floral arrangements, not bouquets from local gardens.
“Robert’s sweetheart must have been here,” the observers commented. And they told again of the events surrounding Robert’s funeral, of how his sweetheart whispered, “Robert, I’ll never leave you.”
Years passed, and the periodic evidences of care for Robert Musgrove’s grave continued. Then, as time went by, some woman in the community noticed that there had been no fresh flowers on Robert’s grave in a long time. She commented to a friend on the long absence of flowers.
“Well,” the friend replied, “just think how many years it has been since Robert died. His sweetheart must be dead now, too. If she’s not dead, she must be too old and feeble to visit the grave. She kept her promise for many years though, didn’t she?” Then one Sunday in 1962 as worshippers were coming out of Musgrove Chapel at the close of the morning service, someone glanced over into the graveyard.
“What’s that on Robert Musgrove’s tombstone?” she asked. “It looks like a shadow of some kind.”
Several people, prodded by curiosity, walked into the cemetery to get a closer look. There on Robert Musgrove’s tombstone they saw the distinct silhouette of a young girl. Her head was bowed and her hands were folded as if in prayer. The silhouette was so distinct that the viewers could see her hair piled high on her head. Even the curve of her eyelashes was quite plain.
“It’s Robert Musgrove’s sweetheart!” an older man in the group exclaimed. “That’s just the way she looked when she knelt on Robert’s grave and promised, ‘Robert, I’ll never leave you.’ I was just a boy, but I saw her and heard her—and I’ll never forget it.”
News of the image of the young girl on Robert Musgrove’s grave marker spread quickly throughout that part of Alabama, and curiosity seekers by the hundreds swarmed to the country churchyard.
The invasion of strangers upset members of the Musgrove family, and they tried to remove the image from the stone. But though they scoured and rubbed and scrubbed, the image would not come off. Finally they sent to Birmingham for a stonemason to sandblast the figure from the granite.
With the image gone, the unwelcome visitors stopped coming to the cemetery, and talk in the community turned to other things.
But the image returned, as plain as ever. Again the story of the lover’s promise was told, and again the throngs of strangers came to look and wonder.
The stonemason returned to clean the stone. When he left, the tall marker was as white and unsullied as the day it was put in place.
With the figure gone from tombstone, the crowds again lost interest in the grave and in its link to the supernatural.
But, they say, the likeness of the grieving sweetheart slowly returned on the surface of the tombstone until, once again, it was as well defined as it had been the day it first appeared.
“She loved Robert very much,” the tellers of the story say. “Her love was as strong as her promise, ‘Robert, I’ll never leave you.’”
2
Renfroe (Talladega County), Alabama
None of his descendants now knows why Jacob Hammer left his native Indiana and moved to Alabama. They do know from records in family Bibles that Jacob Hammer was living in Talladega County when he married Martha Louisa Hicks of Renfroe on December 1, 1887. He was thirty-four at the time of their marriage, and his bride was twenty-one.
Mr. Hammer had taught school and had been engaged in merchandising in Indiana, and family tradition says he taught school, ran a store, and farmed after he came to Alabama.
In the first six years of their marriage, five children were born to the couple: Cassandra, William Benjamin, Emma Everett, Diana, and Dixie Homer. Some of the children’s names, family members point out, reflect Mr. Hammer’s interest in Greek and Roman mythology. He was interested in many things. He wanted to call his first child by her full name, Cassandra, but his wife, who cared little for the classics, insisted on calling her Cassie, and Cassie she became.
Cassie was nine years old when her baby brother, Harvey,