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Edward Roll REMEMBERED This to Edward Roll, who died more than a century ago. He realizes his death-bed desire when rain undermines his resting place in a quaint Quaker cemetery. By Alfred Segal Edward Roll, a citizen of Cincinnati, died 103 years ago and was buried in the Quaker cemetery at Dreman Av[enue] and West Fork Creek. He was 48 years old. It seems that, on his deathbed, Edward Roll gave thought to his past and future. Forty-eight years he had lived, labored, striven, gained and lost, but now, on his deathbed he say that only one thing was worth while in life: So to live that one will be remembered afterward. This was the chief purpose of existence, and only those who are dead are forgotten. Now, when they erected his tombstone, his relatives inscribed upon it a pledge of remembrance in these words: Remember thee? Ah, yes, we will One hundred years passed, and those who had made the pledge to the memory of Edward Roll had died. His name was forgotten in the city and many rains undermined his tombstone so that it fell prone. The earth commenced to slide, and slowly the tombstone and its pledge and the bones of Edward Roll slipped down the hill. None could tell which was the earth and which was Edward Roll. Yesterday the Post's photographer, climbing the hill, uncovered the tomb stone and read the pledge of remembrance. And a few feet away lay the bones of Edward Roll - a skull and a jawbone. At least, it must be presumed that these are the bones of Edward Roll, for they are like all the other bones that lately have been dug from the cemetery of the Quakers, and no one can tell which was the rich man's bones and which was the poor one's; which the wise one's and which the fool's. All are alike forgotten. But look. The wish of Edward Roll to be remembered is here fulfilled. One hundred and three years after his death he is given a prominent place in a newspaper for a day. The Quaker cemetery, in which Edward Roll has slept for a century, came into public notice the other day when Magistrate James Myers brought suit charging the bones of his grandparents had been removed from their graves. The old cemetery had been converted into a sandpit and many of the bones have been taken out and stored in a shed for future burial. Charles Miller of the Miller Sand Co. says the elements alone are to blame for the fact that Edward Roll's bones were not as tenderly guarded as the bones of the others. They were in a section of the cemetery apart from the place where the sandpit is located. These bones now having been discovered, they will join the others in another resting place. _____ |