Finally in the last few weeks I have had some time to get out and walk around my new town and begin to learn the lay of the land. Work and travel have kept me from getting acquainted with Rogue River, and it’s made me feel a bit out of sorts to not know more about where I’m now living. I noted that there was a small Victorian-era cottage housing the Woodville Museum (incorportating the town’s former name), and I decided that I’d have to make some time to stop in there and learn some background. Before I took the time to do that, though, I stumbled across the cemetary, founded in 1888. Compared to communities on our east coast or Europe, I realize that doesn’t seem so terribly long ago, but that was only 16 years after the town was established. I figured I might get an initial, albeit rather unusual, history lesson here. On one beautiful fall afternoon I strolled beneath a canopy of 70- to 80-foot-tall oak, madrone, pine and fir trees. Here the only sounds were the crunch of gravel and acorns beneath my feet and the rustle of dry leaves in the breeze high overhead. I was drawn toward the far reaches of the cemetary where the oldest gravestones stood, and noted as I went that there were no elaborate marble monuments or mausoleums. The majority of the people laid to rest here more than a hundred years ago were from fairly humble backgrounds, and the modest granite headstones generally held the most basic information about those laid beneath. Whereas some carried only a name and the years of birth and death, others revealed a little more about the loved ones lost and the ones left behind to memorialize them. Some of the saddest, of course, where those marking the graves of mere babies and children which spelled out exactly how long the child was on this earth. This one commemorated two children from one family:  Minnie M./Born Apr 26, 1896/Aged 9 yrs 8 mos 16 ds/ Stella Oct 18, 1891 Aged 1 da I wandered for over an hour, noting the popularity of “Ida May” in the mid-1880s as a girl’s name, the apparent pride in one’s origins when the place as well as the date of a birth was included in an inscription (Aberdeenshire, Scotland; near Logan, Dearborn Co., ND; Flemingsburg, Ky), generations of families clustered together within neat, low, stone walls. Finally, there was one stone which led me to the tiny Woodville Museum to search for some answers. I learned that this town founded on the banks of the Rogue River, which rises in the Cascade Mountains to the east, has experienced major floods many, many times over the course of the last 125 years or so. Typically the river and several tributaries spill over their banks in the late winter, following a season-long buildup of a high snowpack in the mountains and a lowland snowfall of several inches followed by heavy, warm rains and a rapid melt. Just such conditions occurred in February of 1898, when even the valley floor received an unusual knee-deep snow before the temperature quickly rose and the rains began to pour down. This is the inscription on a tall, plain stone slab at the back of the Woodville Cemetary which led me to search out these facts, its few words telling an entire, heart-wrenching story:             Olaf P. Randall/Born/Feb 12, 1850/Drowned Feb 13, 1898             Oleva B./dau. of/O.P. & B. Randall/Born Feb 12, 1891/Drowned Feb 13, 1898                               How we miss our dear ones! Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader