I’ve never participated in the Post-A-Week challenge before, so here’s my first attempt.
Bethany Lutheran Indian Cemetery
This is a photo of the Bethany Lutheran Indian Cemetery in St. Louis, Michigan. The cemetery dates from the 184os. When German evangelist Edward R. Baeierlein arrived in Frankenmuth — a German colony that continues to exist, albeit as a tourist destination — mid-Michigan was a nearly impenetrable forest. Baeierlein followed a French-Indian guide ten hours into the wilderness to where a band of thirty Chippewa lived in bark-covered “wigwams.” He stayed with his flock for five and a half years, until the Lutheran Synod reassigned him to India. During that time, he built a log church, complete with a steeple and bell, translated the New Testament and some German hymns into Chippewa, and buried Pauline, a sixteen-year-old convert who’d died of tuberculosis. In order to inter the “churched” separately from the “heathen,” Baeierlein himself cleared a “plot of ground on a little hill, built a fence around it, and erected a tall cross.”
It’s a beautiful little patch of ground.