The Arcane Texas Fact of the Day is unbelievable:
If you go to the Pioneer Cemetery in Fort Davis, Texas, you will find a grave that contains the bodies of seven children belonging to the Bentley family, all of whom died of diphtheria within a two-week period in 1891. The seven Bentley children, who are buried together in a common grave, ranged in age from two months to seventeen years and their parents watched helplessly as, one by one, their precious offspring died of the disease. Death by diphtheria is unbelievably cruel: it's a highly-contagious upper respiratory disease that is frequently caused by bacteria in unpasteurized milk. Those afflicted suffer sore throats, raging fevers and increasingly impaired breathing as a membrane grows across the trachea, eventually resulting in death by suffocation.
The story goes beyond this, though. In Fort Davis there is a large pecan tree that was planted in 1873 by Flora, the oldest of the children who died in this tragedy. Her father, George Bentley, had been a private who had first come to Fort Davis as a Buffalo Soldier in 1868 and, a couple of years later, when his enlistment expired, returned to that fair town to become a teamster and a civilian packer. George married a woman named Concepción Rodríguez, acquired some cattle, and had seven children. Then the tragedy struck and George and his wife lost all of their kids to diphtheria. As if burying their children was not enough heartbreak, a vicious rumor was spread that their deaths had come as the result of a curse that had been placed upon George for bayoneting an Apache child while he had been in the Army ---- a rumor that does not appear to be true and that is totally unsupported by the historical record.
I believe that this sad series of events would have crushed me, but it did not crush George and Concepción: they went on to have three more children, all of whom survived. One of them, George Bentley, Jr., was born in 1900, passed away in 1987, and is also buried in the St. Joseph Cemetery in Fort Davis.
Pecans normally live for only about 75 years or so, but Flora's tree has been alive for nearly twice that long and is still producing bumper crops of pecans. I have noticed that, properly tended, things can live a long time in West Texas. This tree is certainly testimony to that.
I have a call in to the Fort Davis Chamber of Commerce, requesting the address of the tree. If they are able to provide it, I will edit this post.