In 1797, Elijah Hicks was born. Before he was 60, at the old age of 59, his body was brought here, to Claremore, and his was the first body laid down, in a casket, in a grave, and he started the occupancy of Claremore Cemetery in 1854, 53 years before statehood, and 225 years before now.
A high-leader in the Cherokee Tribe, editor of the Cherokee Phoenix Newspaper, was a captain on The Trail Of Tears, and signed the Cherokee Treaty of 1839 in Washington D.C..
Standing at this gravesite, looking East, it is not in the center of the cemetery, but off to the South. It is not truly East or West, a little bit further east of the lines.
But when you look at the cemetery as a whole, you see that each gravestone is built reading to the west, with the grave, east, with the casket turned so each one, if opened, would open to to North, and the caskets of Elijah Hicks time would have opened from the head to the feet.
All stones facing East, across the acres, across the time from 1854 to the graves being dug today, or tomorrow, or in the future, lighting upon that one simple vision, of looking to Christ in the Eastern sky.
Roads have been built, tools have improved, digging of graves has been stepped up, and
monuments for the dead have become complete. They all lay the same. They all lay together.
Ralph E Peck
Photo by Ralph Peck
Claremore Cemetery
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