Rebecca Winters Gravesite

In August of eighteen fifty-two, a Mormon pioneer named Rebecca Winters died of cholera right about here, on the long wagon road toward the Salt Lake Valley. She was in her early fifties, traveling west with her family like tens of thousands of others crossing the Platte Valley that decade. There was no time and no stone for a proper grave. So a family friend named William Reynolds took an iron wagon tire, scratched her name and her age into the curved metal, and bent it over the spot to mark where she lay.

That humble iron marker survived for well over a hundred years, and hers is one of the few graves along the trail that was identified at the time. By the nineteen nineties the railroad ran just six feet away, so in nineteen ninety-five the whole grave was carefully moved a short distance to safety, where you can visit it today. Her husband Hiram and Reynolds buried her away from the trail, lining the grave with wooden planks and wrapping her in blankets. In eighteen ninety nine, surveyors for the Burlington and Missouri Railroad found the grave, and the railroad rerouted its tracks a few feet away rather than disturb it. When the grave was moved in nineteen ninety five, more than sixty descendants attended, and she now rests in a mahogany casket about one hundred yards from the original site.