Polly the Parrot

In this cemetery rests West Plains' first celebrity, and she was not a person at all. She was a parrot named Polly. Bought in New Orleans by a doctor named Thomas Bradford, Polly was a Cuban bird who spoke both Spanish and English with rare fluency.

After a tornado killed the doctor near Marshfield in eighteen eighty, Polly went to live with his daughter, Sallie Bradford Langston, here in West Plains. She became famous for her piety. Polly could pray aloud and sing whole stanzas of old hymns, including How Firm a Foundation and Jesus Lover of My Soul.

At church meetings she reportedly sang and prayed so fervently that she outdid the preacher himself. When Polly died, the Langstons laid her in a little casket beneath an inscribed granite headstone.