Ask Thy Father

Somewhere along the crooked roadways of the Western Pennsylvania countryside is the small, idyllic farm community of Dutch Corner, which rests just northeast of Bedford. It was named after the former “Deutch” German immigrants who called this their home some two centuries ago. Messiah Lutheran Church, a congregation which traces its origins to the period just after the American Revolution, lends its name to Messiah Church Road. The church is a modest brick construction that reflects the cautiously observed piety and humility of the founder’s Palatinate homeland. The churchyard is filled with gravestones that are a mix of old and modern, showcasing the long continuity of such institutions. One poignant stone near the road has the words of the Book of Deuteronomy engraved into it, which is slowly fading on the white stone edifice:

“Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee.”

The engraving is apropos. In a time of forgetting, it reminds us that memory survives because someone cares to remember, and because someone else cares enough to ask. It is fitting for both a cemetery, as a place where the past is intentionally recalled, and for a local church, which acts as the great custodian of local memory. If we walk around the corner, we spy something even more striking: a small grave nestled under a holly tree behind the corner of the church. The unassuming piece of white sandstone tells a very short story:

Indian Eve: Wife of Adam Ernst 1740 – 1815 Captured by Indians 1777. Held prisoner 8YS. Detroit, 1YR. Ft. Duquesne. Rode a pony home. Her descendants are from coast to coast.

It is hard to imagine an epitaph that is more laden with biographical meaning. Just one of those sentence fragments could serve as the plot of a novelette. Unfortunately, stones in an old churchyard offer little room to expand upon these brief traces of what must have been a spectacularly rich life. By some chance, or fluke of providence, however, her descendants decided to compose a brief account of her life and times, which they faithfully published nearly a century later in 1911.

According to that account, Indian Eve (Eve Earnest) lived with her husband, Henry Earnest, and their children on a farm along Dunning’s Creek, in what was then the frontier British province of Pennsylvania. The family spoke a mix of German and English and had, over time, accustomed themselves to life in the Appalachian Mountains. In the year 1777, Shawnee Indians attacked the Earnest homestead, killing her husband Henry and several others in a raid. Eve and her two youngest sons survived and were taken captive by the Shawnees for some time, subsisting on deer tallow and whatever they could scavenge from the land. In 1785, they were discovered by the British garrison at Fort Detroit. The Indians proceeded to ransom them to the British Army for silver coins and a quantity of whiskey. Grateful for her manumission, Eve repaid her ransom and the ransom of her children to the British officers at the fort, sewing and cleaning for them. She eventually saved enough money to purchase a pony, which she used to traverse the untamed countryside of the Northwest Territory, returning down the old Forbes Road to Bedford County, where she was reunited with the children who had escaped the attack nearly a decade before. She remarried and achieved local notoriety for her sojourn. It was noted in her later biography that toward the very end of her life, she cooked for the young men who built the church in which she was now buried.

The inscription on her gravestone is almost aggressively concise, yet every phrase opens up onto a landscape that still exists. The oddity is that while these places are still there, the ways that they were remembered are gone. The British gentleman occupying Fort Detroit left in 1796. The modern city of Detroit is its heir. The old Forbes Road still cuts through Ft. Duquesne (Pittsburgh), but no ponies are to be found on it today. The townlands in which she lived are still there, but German is not commonly spoken about town or even among her descendants.

While there are a number of remarkable things about Eve’s story, what is particularly striking is that it survived at all. That our ancestors had their adventures is a certainty; that the stories will be transmitted is not. The vast majority of the past has dissolved into a state of prehistory, forgotten because there was no one who thought it worthy of recording. The account of Indian Eve did not endure because a state archive preserved it, or because a university historian judged it important enough to preserve. It survived because her descendants, and the local Lutheran congregation, thought her story should be commemorated. Sometime in the past, it was recognized that the generation of living memory, those who knew Eve herself, were slipping away, and people resolved to write down her account before the memory itself became another casualty of time.

That resolution lies at the heart of the command from Deuteronomy engraved upon the neighboring gravestone. Memory is a civilizational obligation. The capacity to recall its own history is part of the acid test of any civilization, old or new. In ancient days, on the very edge of our own cultural memory, Israel was commanded to remember because forgetfulness is a moral dead end, while the anamnesis of a people meant their survival as a people. Those who lose their memories eventually lose their identity, and are unable to inherit the past. It is telling that Moses does not tell Israel to consult a royal archive or the scriptures themselves. The act of commemoration is first a human obligation before it is a literary one. It is transmitted from one generation to another through a moral energy. Every generation receives an inheritance that it did not earn and incurs a responsibility that it did not rightfully choose. It is commanded to pass its own familial and cultural inheritance onward without diminishing it.

Without those descendants, Indian Eve herself would simply have been another weathered stone along an old country road. Her remarkable life would be reduced to a page in a dusty old vestry book, perhaps only a name and two uncertain dates. The act of remembering is not the preservation of a collection of facts. It is an encounter with the dead, with their collective wisdom and sufferings. The dead have entrusted us with their stories, and it requires the tacit acknowledgment that the lives which made our own possible are not ours to ignore. Instead, because someone remembered, there is still someone to ask, and someone still able to tell us that Eve rode her pony home.

Image Credit: Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, “Seaside Cemetery” (1897)