Weldon Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, every good cemetery has a story, and the one outside Weldon, in Houston County, starts not with death but with a gift. In 1912, the Thompson Brothers Lumber Company, which later became the Champion Lumber Company, donated four acres of land to the people of the Weldon Community.

Four acres set aside, free and clear, for a place to lay their dead to rest. A generous act. A serious one.

The kind that says a community intends to stay. But here's the part that'll settle quiet over a campfire. The very first souls buried in that brand new ground that same year were not pioneers worn down by decades of hard living.

They were children. Louise Driskell, one year old, and her brother Leo, two years old, both taken by diphtheria. Two babies, a sister and her brother, the first to be received by that donated earth.

You think about the families who came after, choosing this place, and you understand they were joining something that had already asked the hardest price. The years kept coming. Pioneers put down roots in Houston County soil, and when their time came, this ground received them too, along with their children and their children's children.

And the veterans found their way here, men who had answered the call in the Civil War, in the First World War, in the Second, in Korea, in Vietnam. Generation after generation, conflict after conflict, their names gathered in those four acres. Today the Weldon Civic Club and a cemetery association keep watch over the place, tending what the Thompson Brothers lumber men started and what little Louise and Leo were the first to consecrate.

Four acres. One community. And at the very beginning of it all, two children who never had the chance to grow old enough to know what they'd started.

What the marker says

The Thompson Brothers Lumber Company (later Champion Lumber Company) donated four acres of land at this site to the people of the Weldon Community for a cemetery in 1912. The first persons buried here that year were one-year-old Louise Driskell and her two-year-old brother, Leo, both victims of diphtheria. Among the graves are those of area pioneers and their descendants, as well as veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. The Weldon Civic Club and a cemetery association care for the historic graveyard.