From Bent Twigs in Jefferson County, by the inestimable late County Historian, Jean Patterson Bible. Transcribed by the incomparable Doris Kinser Fountain.

A Promise Kept

by Sylvia Hart, Press Reporter, Mobile (AL) Press Register, 1970

(p. 95)

An unfulfilled childhood promise kept forcing itself into her thoughts through the years until finally 77-year-old Mrs. A. M Brown of Mobile did something about this summer.

"Try to find your grandfather's grave," the child's grandmother, Mrs. Joseph A. Rogers, had urged. Today a grandmother herself -- even a great grandmother -- Mrs. Brown has found the grave of her grandfather, Pvt. Joseph Alston Rogers, Co. E, 43rd Regiment of Alabama Volunteers.

Soon after the opening battles of the Civil War, Rogers, 34 or 35, mounted his horse and rode away to fight. Mrs. Rogers had walked beside her husband to the horse and watched until the man and horse faded away in the distance.

Standing inside the house peering through the door were the five children. Mrs. Brown's mother then was eight years old and the oldest child. She was holding the three-month-old baby in her arms. All were crying.

"I never heard of my grandmother getting any letters, and knowing my family as I do, I imagine those letters would have been treasured if she had," says Mrs. Brown.

As Mrs. Brown grew up in the village of Nanafalie, a little more than 100 miles north of Mobile, she heard her grandmother's stories of her family's struggle in that same region during the bitter war years.

When the conflict drew to a close, a Confederate soldier, probably from the region around Nanafalie, came to the grandmother's house.

"Your husband died in the war. He is buried in Strawberry Plains, Tennessee, at the foot of an oak tree," he solemnly informed the widow.

With this, he drew out Rogers' pocketknife, New Testament, and a picture taken from his pockets. Mrs. Brown muses, "I remember the picture of my grandfather was unusual -- it was made on glass." It was accidentally broken later.

The Mobile woman, 5229 Greenwood Lane, last February sought the help of her nephew and his wife, Mr. And Mrs. Charles Anderson of Nashville, Tennessee.

After a visit to the Tennessee State Library and Archives Building in Nashville, the nephew determined his forebear was not buried in the Confederate Cemetery in Knoxville. He then learned how to get to Strawberry Plains, expecting to find nothing but a cemetery, but maybe just a field. The three searchers arrived at a village. This was Strawberry Plains.

A 91-year-old resident, "a very gracious person who has written books on that area," according to Mrs. Brown, informed the trio all the known soldiers . . .[remainder of story to be added when transcribed].