A tragic tale from the mountains south of Altoona. What the placard doesn't tell you is that George and Joseph's parents (Samuel and Susannah Cox) had just moved back to this region after a failed attempt at homesteading out in Indiana. They had many more children after these first two were lost here in the woods. Soon after the event described here, George fought for the Union cause in the Civil War. Click on photos to enlarge them.
There was no way to get a decent photographic angle on this monument that stands on the spot where the two boys' bodies were found. It's enclosed in chain link due to past vandalism. If you read the sign in the above photo: I don't know what I believe about the power of dreams, but I do know that stories get conflated over time. Things that people thought, or imagined, or hoped can become cold, hard fact. And yet, this sad event did inspire Allison Krauss’s hauntingly sad song “Jacob’s Dream.” You should look it up and listen to it.
Imagine a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old lost in this place. Even today, this part of the Appalachian Mountains is a dense wilderness. The Lost Children Monument sits in a lonely hollow in the woods of State Game Land #26, just outside the gorgeous and remote
Blue Knob State Park. The little-traveled
Lost Turkey Trail meanders right past the solitary spot on its 26-mile run through the mountains.
The Editorial Board at S&J has revised this article due to the many comments from readers complaining of the "derogatory tone" of the original. The writer was dismissed from his position at S&J and worked for a while on the Ted Cruz presidential campaign before going to work at a meth lab in the mountains near Blue Knob.
ReplyDelete