The following teaser is from the May 25, 2012 edition of OregonLive.com
COOS BAY [Oregon]– The teens in the Marshfield Pioneer Cemetery were growing bored. It was drizzly and dreary and they’d been poking around long enough. It was time to give up. But first, they would try one more grave.
No one knows how long the stone marking Mary Stauff’s resting place had been missing. Markers for the rest of the family were there: husband Alex, a prominent Coos County pioneer; son, Ernest, and young son Edward, dead at just 14 due to “overstudy,” according to the obituary in the July 10, 1892, Morning Oregonian.
But like so many others in the old graveyard, the stone marking Mary’s 87 years had vanished.
Now, Angela Kimball, a junior at Marshfield High School, and a handful of other students were on a quest to recover Stauff’s stone.
Using a large metal poker supplied by volunteer advisor Cricket Soules, they jabbed the earth, listening carefully for the sound of metal on stone.
“At first we were all gung ho, but as time went by we were like, ‘Really?’ We lost hope,” Kimball says. Now, they would have to tell a family member who’d been inquiring about Mary Stauff that her headstone was lost.
