Stone Gardens: Couple were the son of a missionary and the daughter of an assassinated Cherokee political leader

Josiah and Susan Washbourne

Among the historic rows of Polson Cemetery in Delaware County, a pair of stones mark the resting place of Josiah Woodward Washbourne and his wife, Susan Catherine Ridge Washbourne.

Born on July 15, 1819, at the Old Dwight Mission in what was then the Cherokee Reservation of Arkansas Territory, Josiah was the son of the Reverend Cephas Washburn, the Vermont-born Presbyterian missionary who helped establish that early school and preaching station among the Western Cherokees, and of Abigail Woodward Washburn.

The mission years shaped the boy who grew up amid the work of translating scripture, teaching reading and writing, and navigating the pressures that would soon force more Cherokees westward.

He received the education available through the mission environment and the scholarly household of his parents, developing into a man later remembered as a ripe scholar and ready writer of both prose and poetry.

On January 27, 1847, Josiah married Susan Catherine Ridge, born in 1829 in the Cherokee Nation East, the daughter of John Ridge and Sarah Bird Northrup Ridge, and thus the granddaughter of Major Ridge.

John Ridge

The union joined the son of a leading missionary family to the daughter of one of the most prominent and controversial figures in Cherokee politics. John Ridge had been educated in New England, had advocated for the Treaty of New Echota, and had been assassinated on June 22, 1839, near the very ground that would later become Polson Cemetery.

Susan carried that legacy into her married life. The couple made their home first in Arkansas, where Josiah became a lifelong resident of the state and the adjacent Indian Territory. In the mid-1840s, he co-edited the Van Buren Intelligencer with William Quesenbury, contributing writing that showed literary skill and feeling.

He resided for a time in Fayetteville, where his hospitality and kindness were well known among the older citizens, and he lived in affluent circumstances after his marriage into the Ridge family.

In the 1850s Josiah held positions of public trust, most notably as United States agent for the Seminoles, a role he filled from about 1854 into the late 1850s. In that capacity he managed significant funds and official business with the Seminole Agency, corresponding with superintendents and other agents, and no charge of dishonor ever attached to his name in the handling of those responsibilities.

He interacted regularly with tribal leaders, fellow Indian agents, and government officials in the course of his duties. The family eventually settled in the Delaware District of the Cherokee Nation near Honey Creek, close to the homes of Susan’s relatives, including her sister Flora and brother-in-law Dr. W. D. Polson.

Their children included Percy Holden Washbourne, Annie C. Washbourne, Claude Lorraine Washbourne, Mabel Stuart Washbourne, Edward Northrup Washbourne, and the infant Aeneas.

The Civil War years brought severe reverses. The conflict found Josiah in comfortable circumstances and left him bankrupt in both fortune and health. In the summer of 1871, Susan died on August 21 at the residence of her sister Mrs. Flora C. Polson in Delaware District after a long and painful illness.

Josiah followed her a few months later. He died on December 27, 1871, at the age of fifty-two, at the home of his brother-in-law Dr. W. D. Polson in the Cherokee Nation.

Contemporary accounts noted that the loss of his wife and the lingering effects of wartime misfortune had broken his sensitive nature. Both were laid to rest in Polson Cemetery, their graves recorded near plot 116 on the old survey maps, close to the monuments of Major Ridge, John Ridge, Stand Watie, and other kin of the Ridge, Bell, Polson, and Watie lines.

The cemetery itself took shape in the years after the 1839 killings. John Ridge was among the first interred there, murdered only a short distance from the present burial ground. Major Ridge’s remains were later moved to the same hillside. Stand Watie and members of his family joined them in time, as did related households bound by blood and marriage.

The Washbournes form one of those connecting threads, linking the missionary impulse of Dwight Mission to the Treaty Party leadership whose decisions and deaths helped define the Cherokee Nation in the West, and further to the official work of federal Indian administration in the years before the war.

Later flooding from reservoir construction forced the relocation of some family remains, yet the stones of Josiah and Susan remain among those that still stand on the original ground.

Today the markers are simple, weathered by more than a century and a half of northeastern Oklahoma weather.

Visitors who find them stand amid a landscape that once held the homes of the Ridges and Waties, a place where political violence, missionary work, intermarriage, literary effort, public service, wartime loss, and the long aftermath of removal all left their quiet record in stone.

Josiah Woodward Washbourne, son of the missionary Cephas, husband of the granddaughter of Major Ridge, editor, Seminole agent, and Arkansas man of letters, rests there with his wife, two lives joined across the lines of culture and history that shaped early Indian Territory.