ID sought of little girl left in North Carolina grave 85 years ago

HAMPSTEAD, N.C. — The father had helplessly watched his little girl deteriorate from sickness to death a few days earlier. And now he stands 2,500 miles from home with a borrowed shovel in his hand.

Besides the company of a 9-year-old local boy who happened upon the scene, the solemn father, a Mormon traveling from Utah, was alone as he buried his child in an unfamiliar North Carolina cemetery just off the Atlantic shoreline. There were no pallbearers or relatives to help carry the actual and emotional weight of it all. There were no flowers. And there were no prayers — at least none uttered aloud.

It was just a father in a grassless, windswept cemetery toiling to tear open a fresh wound in the earth as precisely wide as the size of the hole left in his heart.

That was in 1925. And while the father's pain of burying his toddler might have waned over the years until his own death sometime later, the feeling of that ominous afternoon in Hampstead, N.C., only worsened for the dirty, redheaded Mormon boy who momentarily paused work in his family's nearby garden to aid the desperate father in the Mormon church-owned cemetery.

That boy, Marion Barnhill, is now a frail 93-year-old man desperate for answers to a mystery he's only held a handful of clues to for the past 85 years. He said that before he dies, he wishes someone somewhere will recognize the following story from their relatively recent family history. He hopes they'll come forth with the identity of the unidentified girl, who may have siblings still alive today.

Rewind 85 years

At his mother's request that spring morning in 1925, Barnhill went to work in the family garden, which shared a property line with the graveyard.

"That's when I saw them drive up the dirt road into the cemetery," Barnhill said. "I don't 'member the color, but I know it was a four-door (car)."

The father stepped out of his vehicle, approached the boy and asked for a shovel. While young Barnhill hustled to the barn and back, the man unloaded a smallish, "about 36-inch-long" casket from the backseat of his car.

The man worked in mostly silence, but a few details from their spotty conversation burned into Barnhill's memory.