Stone Gardens: Border cemetery in Fort Smith/Pocola home to miner killed in 1892 tragic accident

Depending upon who you ask, a quiet roadside cemetery along the old Texas Road is in Fort Smith or Pocola, Sebastian or LeFlore County, and . Arkansas or Oklahoma...

The historic stone garden, which spans the borders of the two states at the extreme western side of Fort Smith is one of the few cemeteries across the nation with the unique feature of meandering across the state border. Even a rudimentary site survey of the property reveals that some of the residents of the grounds are, indeed, buried in both states.

Given the timeline created by the monuments in the cemetery, burials started on the Arkansas side and expanded in a western direction as more burials swallowed up the room for plots on the eastern side.

There are numerous graves that predate the Civil War and one from 1865, that of Susan Eliza Titchenal Brown, is the eternal resting place of the wife of deputy George H. Brown who served both before and during the tenure of Judge Issac C. Parker.

Just a few yards from Mr. and Mrs. Brown plot is the grave of a 23-year-old South Sebastian resident who died a horrible death on January 6, 1892 at the bottom of a mine shaft on the Mazzard Prairie plain in Bonanza.

Edgar C. Garrett was born February 28, 1868 in Lafayette County, Mississippi to Thomas Lorin and Ellender Flanagan Garrett the second child out of that relationship but before he turned the age of 12 the father and son aspect of that union had moved to western Arkansas without Ellender. A daugther, Eula Dean, also traveled to the Natural State with the Garrett men.

Once in Arkansas, T.L. Garrett remarried to Georgia Udora “Ann" Vanderburg , a widowed woman seventeen years his junior, sometime in the mid-to-late 1870's.

Once in Arkansas, T,L, Purchased land in present day Bonanza to make a go of it as a farmer, which had been his profession in Mississippi. However, the discover of coal rich properties all over that part of south Sebastian county led to an agreement with the noted developer and coal magnet Campbell Leflore out of Atoka to lease the land for exploration.

It seems part of the lease agreement was that young Edgar Garrett have employment in the mine company, and he seems to have taken to it well. In this early 20's. Edgar had already risen to a position where he and a work partner were a two-8man crew "opening rooms" in existing shafts of the mines bearing the black gold the fields yielded.

Married in July of 1889 to Delilah Prescott, an Arkansas native, Edgar was a young father on January 6, 1892 when he went to work for his afternoon shift at the Campbell mine diggings in Bonanza.

He would never returned home.

That afternoon, Edgar and his digging partner George Prescott had returned from lunch after spending part of their day working a particularly worrisome off-shoot room that they had started without the essential safety measure of supporting timbers.

When they returned after lunch, Prescott refused to continue working in the precarious situation and came topside to register a complaint and convince the superintendent to halt the exploration until safety measures could be put in place.

Moments after he emerged. a loud rumbling emitted from the pit along with a cry for help as the section where he and Edgar had been working caved-in on itself.

Rescue workers were able to get to Edgar within a shot time, but it was to late.

The young miner was crushed under a massive slab of the slate roof that had fallen, crushing his entire upper body.

A later autopsy showed he also had a fractured skull and doctors said he had died instantly.

The body was recovered that day and arrangements were made with Birnie Brothers' Funeral Home of Fort Smith for an $18 service.

Edgar was interred in the hallowed ground at Leard Cemetery before sundown the next day.

While T. L. and Edgar Garrett are both buried in the Leard (Laird) cemetery, Udora found her final resting place in historic Oak Cemetery in Fort Smith in 1924.

Edgar's mother never left Mississippi and was buried in in 1897 in a family plot in Water Valley in Yalobusha County.

There is no record as to why she was left behind when the rest of her family made the move to Arkansas.