Way up the mountainside overlooking Greenbrier valley, midway up the side of Greenbrier Pinnacle, lies a six by six foot gravesite enclosed by the remnants of a rusting wire fence. The decaying fence borders the graves of three children.
John Barnes once had a farmstead here, and three of his children are buried adjacent to the homesite. They lived in relative isolation, even by the standards of their time and place. They would have had a commanding view (though the forest has reclaimed much of that view) and adequate flat land for a subsistence farm, even though the higher elevation could have brought with it harsher weather.
It was not uncommon to bury children in the back yard, keeping them close-by, rather than in one of the community cemeteries in the valley. How wrenching it must have been to leave these graves behind when the establishment of the National Park forced the Barnes' off their property.
The headstones read as follows:
Delia Lenora Barnes
Oct 25, 1897 – Dec 25, 1898
Julies Barnes
Dec 25, 1899 – Feb 7, 1901
Rosey Barnes
Aug 18, 1915 – Sept 17, 1922
As it turns out, the stone inscribed "Julies" was actually a boy named Jules, as discovered in the old family Bible.
GoSmokies member Greg Hoover wrote an eloquent essay on this gravesite (posted elsewhere), calling it "the saddest place in the Smokies." He notes the grief the parents must have experienced, losing one-year-old Delia on Christmas Day. And then one year to the day, Jules is born on Christmas Day, surely a gift from heaven, only to lose him as well, little over a year after his birth. Rosey lived seven years. There were other children born between Jules and Rosey, who survived into adulthood, one being born just one month after Jules died.
We are told that one of the children froze to death after becoming lost in a snowstorm on the mountain. One source says it was Rosey who died in the snow, but considering she died in mid-September, it is doubtful she froze to death in a blizzard of such proportions to become lost.
The story of the Barnes children buried here is thought-provoking enough on its own merits, but the tale takes a few turns along the way. The first child, Delia, was born to John Barnes' first wife. Jules, born two years later, was the offspring of John's second wife. Here is where it gets interesting, that Rosey, the last burial here, was born to John's original first wife.
Another interesting turn of the story, according to Greenbrier historian, Mike Maples, is that when John remarried, the first wife moved into a cabin only about 200 yards from John. This must have made for a tense dynamic, having your divorced wife pretty much breathing down your neck. Perhaps John made the rounds, as Rosey was born to the first wife.
If we drop the story here without further examination, we have a tale of a two-timing husband's dalliance with his divorced wife, who positioned herself practically within earshot of her ex-husband's new bride. Stories are seldom what they appear on the surface, especially when trying to reconstruct them a century later.
What really happened? We may never know, but we do an injustice to the memory of these mountain people if we take the folklore at face value without asking a few questions.
If an ex-wife moved in next door today, we would certainly question her motives. But this wasn't today, and we distort history by trying to see it through modern eyes. We can assume this lady (around 1898) did not go online and Google "Greenbrier housing" to find a place to live. Nor did she search "Greenbrier jobs" for employment. She had to support herself somehow and have a roof over her head. Your community was your support system, and on the side of Greenbrier Pinnacle the community would have been sparse at best. Unless she had family to move in with, an unmarried woman would have stayed close to her base of support. What on the surface might appear to be an act of spite could easily have been an act of necessity.
And then there is the scandal that John had a child by his first wife after marrying his second. But let's set aside our knee-jerk judgment and titillation and take a step back. Sixteen years elapsed between the birth of Jules to the second wife and the birth of Rosey to the original wife. A lot of water passed down Greenbrier valley in those intervening years. Was John still married to the second wife by then? Was she still living? Had she moved on?
As is so often the case, the more answers we uncover, the more questions we uncover. We hope to avoid jumping to conclusions and passing false judgment on people we never met, who are no longer present to defend themselves.