Stone Gardens: A Cherokee orphan lies in eternal repose under a gravel parking lot north of the Salina post office

She was fourteen, maybe fifteen, and she had been in class that Thursday morning. By evening, the chill took her. By 2 a.m., Mary Thornton was gone.

“Last Friday was a sad day with us at the Asylum. One of our best little girls stood well in her studies, but that evening she had a chill. That night she was taken violently ill with spells, and at 2 o’clock she died. The doctor was present but could give her no relief.”

— Cherokee Orphan Asylum Press, February 1900

The student editors buried their grief in ink. They followed the small procession to the rise 200 feet north of Main Street, where the Grand River once lapped the edge of their world.

There, under a raw February sky, Rev. J. F. Thompson preached her funeral. Teachers, pupils, and officers “joined in mourning the loss of such a nice little sister.”

Mary Thornton, born in March 1886, dead on February 1, 1901, was lowered into the Cherokee Nation Orphan Asylum Cemetery, a patch of earth soon to be sliced in half by progress and forgotten beneath a gymnasium floor and a post office parking lot.

The Cherokee Orphan Asylum opened in 1872 on the former plantation of Lewis Ross, brother of Principal Chief John Ross. Built with tribal funds, a total of 15% of the Nation’s annual budget, per the 1866 treaty, it was the first institution of its kind in Indian Territory: entirely Cherokee-funded,

One hundred and fifty children filled its brick halls, a three-story mansion with sixty rooms. A student newspaper, The Press, was turned by hand on a crank press. Lessons in English, arithmetic, sewing, carpentry, and the Cherokee syllabary were taught to all students.

.Orphans arrived from the aftermath of the Trail of Tears and the rubble of the Civil War.

Some walked in barefoot; others were carried in. All were taught to stand tall.

Then came the night of November 17, 1903. A defective flue sparked a fire that devoured the building in hours. Every child escaped. The asylum never reopened. Fifty orphans were shipped to the Whitaker Home in Pryor; the rest scattered. The bricks were left in a mound—still visible today beneath a 1937 WPA gymnasium.

Fifteen miles southwest of Tahlequah, the burial ground sits bisected by modern Ross Street. The northern half lies under the gym; the southern is gravel behind the Salina post office. No fence. No sign. Just the springhouse--Lewis Ross’s 1844 stone relic--listed on the National Register, whispering that something sacred once happened here.

In the 1960s, genealogist James W. Tyner trudged through weeds and horse lots to sketch eight graves for Our People and Where They Rest.

Little Fanny Collier lived three short years--1890 to 1893--and sleeps in plot 3. Two unmarked Galloway children, perhaps siblings, rest in plots 1 and 2. Jefferson Starnes, born in 1849, died in 1896; an adult, likely staff or kin, he lies in plot 2. His daughter Margaret, born in 1867, followed in 1900 and was placed in plot 1.

And then there is Mary--plot unknown, marker long gone--whose fevered night became the cemetery’s loudest echo.

Tyner’s sketches show the graves clustered near the springhouse path. Mary’s is not numbered, perhaps already eroded, perhaps never marked. The gym’s concrete slab, poured in 1937, sealed half the ground; the post office lot graded the rest. Yet, every February, descendants leave silk roses on the Find a Grave pages, a digital vigil for a physical void.

Walk into the Salina High School gym today. Sneakers squeak where Mary’s classmates once sang hymns. The springhouse stands 100 yards away, its stone walls sweating river mist. A bronze plaque proposed in 2018 never materialized.

The Cherokee Nation Cultural Resource Center keeps the file open.

Mary Thorton never saw statehood. Never voted. Never married.

But in the Cherokee Orphan Asylum Press, digitized now at the Oklahoma Historical Society, she left a sentence that outlasted the bricks:

“Stood well in her studies.”

That line is her monument. And somewhere beneath the gym floor or the parking-lot gravel, a fourteen-year-old girl still reminds us the smallest graves sometime hold the loudest lessons in life.

To visit: Park behind the Salina post office. Face north. The gymnasium doors are usually open for basketball practice. Close your eyes. Listen for the river, the chill, the scratch of a hand-cranked press.

To help: Contact the Cherokee Nation Historic Preservation Office (918-453-5000) or the Salina Historical Society. A simple fence and a sign would cost less than one season’s uniforms. Mary Thornton has waited 124 years,

It’s time to honor her memory.