PART 3 — SANKEY GROUND
The woman’s name is Beulah Sankey. She is eighty and she lives eleven miles away in Halverstead.
The land under Verrin Heights belonged to her family from 1891.
There was a farm. There was a house. And on a rise at what is now the back of number nine Pomeroy Lane, there was a family burial ground with an iron fence round it and, by the last count anybody made, eleven markers.
Her grandparents are in it. Two of her father’s brothers, both as infants. Her great-grandfather, who bought the land in 1891.
The family lost it in 1956.
I am not going to set out the whole of how, because it took Beulah Sankey forty minutes to explain it to me and it involves a tax sale, a notice published in a newspaper that was not delivered on that road, and a purchaser who was on the county board.
It happened to a great many families in this state in the fifties and there are books about it.
The farm was subdivided in 1961. Verrin Heights went up between 1962 and 1968.
The burial ground was not moved and it was not disinterred and there is no permit on file anywhere for either, because you cannot do those things without a court order and nobody applied for one.
They graded it, they built over the front half of it, and the back half went under what was, in 1966, a lawn.
In 1978 a woman from the county historical society walked that subdivision with a Sankey family bible and an 1923 plat and recorded the ground’s location to within about forty feet, and filed it with the state.
It has been on a register since 1978.
It is on a list. In an office. Where anybody, including a title company, could have found it.
Dash and Sloane Cordray bought that house in 2019.
Their pool went in in 2021. Somebody dug it, and somebody poured it, and somebody put a deck round it, and my father is the first person in fifty-nine years to pick up a piece of dressed stone out of that fill and make a phone call about it.
Beulah Sankey has been writing letters about that ground since 1994.
She has written to the county four times, to two state offices, and to three successive owners of number nine.
She has a folder. That is the folder. It is two inches thick and the oldest thing in it is from 1994 and the newest thing in it, when she handed me a sheet out of it at twenty past eight on a Sunday morning, was forty hours old.
She has been trying to get somebody to look at that corner for thirty-one years, and what finally did it was a pool man on day four who did not put the deck back.
