{"id":7608,"date":"2011-03-20T06:19:04","date_gmt":"2011-03-20T11:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/?p=7608"},"modified":"2022-05-27T06:14:01","modified_gmt":"2022-05-27T11:14:01","slug":"historic-fort-lincoln","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/historic-fort-lincoln\/","title":{"rendered":"Historic Fort Lincoln"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Most of you will probably want to skip down a bit and start reading at the map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Longtime readers may remember when I went down to Texas for my grandmother’s 100th birthday party. Well, sorrowfully Bernice Sylvester McGaughy<\/a> passed away a few days ago. She was 102 years old and in good health both physically and mentally until about three weeks ago. We’re sad of course but we take solace in knowing that we should all be so fortunate. She lived well for a very long time and then went quietly at the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bernice as a Toddler<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Bernice as a Teen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I told my children about the amazing things she’d seen during her lifetime. The Wright Brothers flew their famous airplane barely five years before her birth. And she lived more than forty years after men landed on the moon; things of that nature. Her siblings all lived into their nineties except for one brother who died of influenza during the Great Pandemic of 1919. That’s ancient history to us today. Yet, she survived all the way to 2011, the last of her generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Making Arrangements<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It’s an odd confluence of events that will lead to her burial at the Fort Lincoln Cemetery in Brentwood, Maryland. I won’t focus on the details except to note that my grandparents were natives of Texas and had lifelong associations with the Lone Star State. Nonetheless my grandfather found himself in a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC when he passed away suddenly in 1958. Now my grandmother will join him there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am the only member of the immediate family that lives in the area. That’s why I went to the cemetery on Saturday to sign various documents required by the State of Maryland. Then I confirmed the location of the plot. Death and taxes may be the only certainties in this world, but even death can’t stop the perpetual wheels of bureaucracy. Her funeral was in San Antonio, TX last week where most of the family said their goodbyes. Thus I will probably be the only person graveside, once I work out those details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Now To the Fort<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

So I came to Fort Lincoln Cemetery, a place I’d never seen before, yet so remarkably close to my home by distance. And here I’ll shift the focus. I’ll move away from the person family story to topics of more general interest to the Twelve Mile Circle community. I discovered a place with a greater number of historical sites than practically any other location I’ve seen of comparable size. Those I examined after finishing with my personal business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n