” Gallipolis, Ohio, July 19 – Forest McGirr1 volunteered to serve his country in the Ninety-first Ohio. The regiment was then forming at Portsmouth. Soon after he went into camp he was taken sick with typhoid fever and in a few days reported dead. He was thought to be actually dead and was laid out. His coffin was brought in and word sent to his home in Lawrence county, where his grave was prepared, and sorrowing friends waited for the corpse that never came.”
“When McGirr’s helpless form was about to be lifted into the coffin, there were indications that life was not altogether gone. The body was yet a little warm. So they waited till life returned and McGirr got well. Then the word came to his home, and the grave that was to be his last abode was filled up. While the earth was being thrown in a boy who had been eating a peach cast in the stone, and it was covered. A little tree grew from that peach stone, and while it grew McGirr was out fighting for his country. The peach tree blossomed on the pastoral hillock. Fruit next came and the other day, for the first time, McGirr went to the peach tree and ate the fruit in gentle memory of the grave he never filled.”2
- Josiah Forrest McGirr
- His Grave Dug. (1899, July 19). Newark Daily Advocate, p. 1.
