Ronald W. Erdrich

Abilene (Texas) Reporter-News

BRECKENRIDGE, Texas — Despite its cheerful name, Babyland could make you cry.

It's hard to imagine a sadder place than the section of a cemetery where small children are laid to rest. It's even harder to imagine any joy in visiting the place. Maybe that is why 26 of the markers in Breckenridge Cemetery’s Babyland were lost over time.

Certainly children are buried all over the cemetery, usually with family. But John Trigg, a caretaker at Breckenridge along with Tommy “Gordy” Gordon, explained why infants often have their own sections.

“A lot of people want family buried with family; some want babies buried with babies. They think that’s the appropriate thing’” Trigg said. “They don’t want them out in the cemetery, they want them buried with other babies.”

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Trigg has worked at Breckenridge Cemetery for nearly 20 years. One of his duties is to mow around the Babyland graves every Friday in preparation for the weekend.

He often noticed many of the graves had no marker. It wasn’t that the names were lost; anyone could look up the plots in official records and see who was buried there.

Instead, family members who had buried their young loved ones never returned to install a permanent stone marker. The temporary metal markers would remain in place, but over time they would fall into disrepair.

Gordon brought a metal detector to work one day to see what remained.

“We went out there and found markers that had been buried just all over the place,” he recalled. “Some of them you could read, some of them you couldn’t.”

How those markers got buried was anyone’s guess. The oldest ones dated from the mid-1970s; it’s likely that rain, new soil and growing grass naturally covered the metal over time.

Previous caretakers knew about these graves, but there wasn’t much they could do if the permanent stone marker never appeared.

“That person would move on and do something else or die, and another person would come in and start working,” Gordon said. “They wouldn’t know.”

Gordon and Trigg acquired new temporary markers from a local funeral home, but it really wasn’t much of a fix.

“We started making them and putting them out there,” Trigg said and shook his head. “(But when you) mow and weed-eat, temporary markers are in your way.”

Gordon agreed. “Those mower blades are kind of hard on them,” he said.

Trigg began to ponder a more permanent solution. He called a monument company to get a price quote on a basic 6-inch-by-8-inch stone for each grave. It was over $1,200.

“They gave me a price and I thought, ‘Oh, man. I don’t know how in the world I’m going to get that much money,’” he said.

Local groups said they wanted to help, but no one ever came through.

It was around this time that Flint Knight, the wholesale accounts manager at Sterling Monument Company, got involved.

“Why don’t you hold onto your money and let me ... see what I can do, because I think we can get those stones,” Knight told Trigg. Knight suggested to Sterling Monument's owner, Sam Harris, that they had enough partial pieces of granite to make 26 small but suitable markers that would only feature the names and the death dates.

“When Mr. Knight came on the scene, we got to talking about it, he went back and talked to his boss,” Trigg said. “Miracle happened.”

Sterling Monument made short work of the job. In less than a month’s time, the 26 pieces of granite were stenciled, carved and finished. They were installed in Babyland on Nov. 12.

This isn’t the only Babyland in the cemetery, merely the most recent.

There are two more on the grounds, but that’s not surprising considering the age of the cemetery. The oldest grave here dates to 1872, including soldiers who fought for Texas' independence from Mexico.

But if missing markers in the latest Babyland are sad, the loss of records from the older sections qualifies as tragic.

Both Gordon and Trigg have tried searching the county museum, funeral homes, and elsewhere. It’s been a tough search, but Trigg is still hopeful.

“There’s a lot over here in these other Babylands; we know somebody is buried there but we don’t have any idea who,” Trigg said, then paused.

“I don’t know, babies are just in my heart,” he said.