Reconnections

It lay beneath shrubbery at the rear of a service station for decades.
Its three names unfamiliar, its origins vague, and its transit from the final resting place of a local family’s burial plot might have had something to do with elephants.
David Rose, owner of Scotty’s Towing adjacent to the lot where his family’s OST station stood for decades, said he remembers when the headstone probably arrived when he was around 10 years old. A truck came, likely an old flatbed GMC truck with wood sides. He said one truck “just shoved off all kinds of debris. Bricks and what-not here…I think that’s how grandpa got into it. Whoever the contractor was had a bunch of bricks from a house on Circle Drive, they were adding onto.”
The house on the lot where the headstone rested all those decades was behind the OST location. Undamaged bricks were stacked neatly, the rest piled up.
“I always asked him, ‘Grandpa, we used to play right here because of the bamboo that was all through here, somebody must have died here.”
“No, no, that’s just pothole material, don’t worry about that,” his grandfather said. “I remember when it was dropped here from that truck. We’ve never touched it, it was never moved.”
Rose mentioned the artifact to local resident Chris Freeman, who maintains an active Facebook page on his research and investigations in to the history of the local area, “The Curious Historian's Historical Society.”
“I contacted Suzanne Wiltz, and she began checking around,” Freeman said, and one contact led to another, which then led to Deborah Robinson, all the way in Maryland, through her mother’s cousin, Mary Pecot. Mary refers to Deborah as “the family historian.”
There are three names on the headstone:
Mary L. Fontenot Pecot died in 1887 at 75 years of age. Her children listed on the headstone were Louise Pecot, died in 1892 at age 48, and Arthemeise Pecot, died 1895 at age 55.
Mary L. was an African-American woman, and Pecot was white. They were the parents of five.
Pierre Pecot and Mary Louise Fontenot were not married, but they are listed as the parents of Louis and Arthemeise’s brother.
Freeman said there are three possible locations the headstone may have come from: the Franklin Cemetery across the street, a cemetery that was once on Fourth Street where Broussard-Harris Recreation Center is today, and a slim possibility that it came from a Willow Street cemetery where the city market is.
“Suzanne didn’t tell me exactly what it was,” Robinson recalled. Wiltz sent her Freeman’s phone number and they connected. “When he started reading the name, I was so overwhelmed…he had been asking if anyone knew those names, but you see how old they are.”
She came to Franklin immediately.
“I was like, oh my gosh, this woman is coming all the way from Maryland!” Freeman said. “To come see this? This means a lot to her.”
Robinson said, “If he’s going to do all that he’s done, the least I can do is come down and help him.”
She regularly makes trips to Franklin to study the family history. The headstone is broken at the top, with a length of iron bar sticking out, signifying that some decorative feature, possibly a cross, is missing.
“The thing is,” Freeman said, “we’re going to try walking around the cemetery to see if we can find any pieces that match…if we can find the piece that matches the etching (in the stone), we know it originated from the big city cemetery. If we don’t find it, it might have been from either of the other two cemeteries.”
“Or it’s buried in the dirt,” Robinson added.
Robinson said the family has a plot in the city cemetery. “So I can’t figure out…we’ve had that plot forever,” she said.
“There’s a history all the way back to the 1800s. Mary was a free person of color. My mother is the only surviving member of the people that grew up in Franklin at 505 Iberia St. She’s 96. She went to her 70th Dillard reunion, and we brought her here because she hadn’t been to Franklin in a long time, and we knew this would be the last trip, really.”
There are plans to clean and restore the section of the marker.
So how do elephants fit into this story?
In October, 1971, there was a 2 a.m. vehicle accident that overturned a truck carrying four elephants.
The Banner-Tribune reported that the animals roamed through town a bit, including the cemetery, and locals say some of the headstones and other fixtures were damaged by the huge beasts. The newspaper headline noted, “Grave Slabs Broken.”
“Following the mishap, Taffy, Jewle, Freda and Jackie, occupants of the trailer, were led to safety at a location behind a small building near the OST Service Station,” it was reported. “Although injured, an attendant remained with the elephants until another truck arrived to transport them to New Orleans. They are scheduled to appear in a four-day stand with Clyde Beaty-Cole Bros. Circus. None of the elephants were injured.
“According to the police report the truck driver, James Borie Hunger, of Cleveland, Ohio, was headed south on Main Street and he stated that when he was negotiating the curve the elephants in the trailer shifted, causing him to lose control of the truck, which turned over.
“A telephone pole was broken and tombstones and slabs of four graves in the cemetery were moved and broken exposing the coffins within.
“The elephants and attendants moved out at about 7 a.m.
There’s no firm evidence that the elephants caused the relocation of Mary L. Fontenot Pecot’s headstone, or from where, the city cemetery across the road, or elsewhere.
But it’s easy to believe that sometimes, there is no such thing as random coincidence.