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Updated: May 14, 2025
The night was as cool as the one when we arrived at Andersonville, the earth, meagerly sodded with sparse, hard, wiry grass, was the same; the same piney breezes blew in from the surrounding trees, the same dismal owls hooted at us; the same mournful whip-poor-will lamented, God knows what, in the gathering twilight.
Five times that gallant regiment charged the battery, and when the smoke of battle cleared away the sun shone down upon a piteous sight blood dyeing the green of that sodded escarp blood in great clots upon the rocks and stumps of the rugged hill below blood poured plenteously upon the dusty road, making it horrible with purple mire blood staining the bridge and gathering in little pools upon the planks, and dripping slowly down through the cracks between them into the sluggish stream, where it floated with the water in great red clouds, toward which creatures dwelling in slimy depths below came up lazily, but when they tasted it became furious and fought among themselves like demons blood drying in hideous networks and arabesques upon the railing of the bridge blood upon the fences, blood upon the trembling leaves of the bushes by the wayside blood everywhere!
Around it in the next few years had sprung up Cottontown. The factory had been built on the edge of an old cottonfield which ran right up to the town's limit; and the field, unplowed for several years, had become sodded with the long stolens of rank Bermuda grass, holding in its perpetual billows of green the furrows which had been thrown up for cotton rows and tilled years before.
Then he carefully sodded the two mounds in the graveyard, and planted old-fashioned sweet pinks upon them, and bidding good-by to the home of his boyhood, he turned his face hopefully to the West. Little they knew what wealth untold Lay hid where the desolate prairies rolled: Who would have dared, with brush or pen, As this land is now, to paint it then? Allerton.
There were squirrels barking and racing in the big trees and over the ground. They crossed the sodded space of lawn and came to the top step for nuts, eating them from cunning paws. They were living life according to the laws of their nature.
Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated, was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks. The town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing with a healthy growth. It was night, and we could not see details, for which we were sorry, for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city.
There were tesselated remains from the time of the great pleasure-saturated Roman emperors, a later distinctly Moorish influence, quattrocento-painted eaves, an eighteenth-century sodded court, and a smoking room with the startling colored glass of the nineteenth.
A visit to the graves of some Federal soldiers completed the inspection. Some of the regiments had interred their dead in trenches; but the New Englanders were all buried separately, and smooth slabs were driven at the heads of the mounds, whereon were inscribed the names and ages of the deceased. Some of the graves were freshly sodded, and enclosed by rails and logs.
Nearest the street the ground had long been occupied, trench parallel with trench, filled to the surface level, sodded green, and each grave marked by a wooden cross.
Course, he did dig up a lot of Vee's favorite dahlia bulbs, and he almost undermined a corner of the kitchen wing when he set out to put a choice bone in cold storage, but he was so comical when he tamped the bone down with his nose that Vee didn't complain. "We can have the hole filled in and sodded over next spring," says Vee. "Huh!" I says.
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