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Exerpt
from a story by John Stegall from Elliott Co. News 1993
That question was undoubtedly asked many,
many times during the last 100 years
or more.
Who was this woman whose remains occupy a lone grave on the farm where Opal
Porter Fults now lives on Brown Ridge? The simple, handcarved gravestone
reads:
“Lydia Hylton, Died Feb 8, 1845, Age
30 yrs., 9 mos., ť (Records indicate that she
was 37 years old.)
At the time of her death, and for a time thereafter, people knew, and
remembered,
who she was, but as the decades passed by, most of her relatives and friends either
died
or moved elsewhere. By 1900 it is likely that no one in this area knew who
she was.
Perhaps “Lydia Hyltonť was, by then, nothing more that just a named inscribed
on a
gravemarker.
Many stories have been handed down from generation to generation concerning
her death and burial. It was probably a fact that of the daughters of Tobias
Cox were
with Lydia at the time of her death. And, supposedly, she attempted to tell
them where
she had hidden some gold coins in an orchard nearby. Local legend inferred
that her
husband, Gordon Hylton, was a heavy drinker and that she had to keep their
gold coins
hidden from him. Maybe this was true, but who knows? Still another story that
local
people often repeated for many years maintained that Mrs. Hylton had been
buried with a
gold ring on each finger. I think we can rest assured that there is no fact
to this story.
Gold was very precious at that time in our history, and I find it difficult
to believe that a
considerable quantity of it would be buried on the fingers of a corpse. At
any rate, these
stories did stir imaginations from time to time, and different people
searched the ground
once covered by the Hylton house. Apparently, they searched in vain the
Hylton gold,
which would have been, at best, only a small quantity, was not found. Also,
it was a
neighborhood rumor that unknown persons had attempted to dug up Lydia Hylton
remains and retrieve the gold rings, which probably never existed in the
first place
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