Site Ed. Note: The theme of "Old Bones and Convenience" regarding the potential adaptation of the Settler’s Cemetery behind the First Presbyterian Church in Charlotte as a small downtown park, and the objection to it for the principal reason that it held within its confines the bones, not of slaves within the unmarked greens, but those of the city’s founders in the well-marked ground within the curtilage, would continue on into the following summer of 1938, finally to be nixed by the city council.

The poetic muse thus inspired, however, by the editorial campaign of The News for its conversion, likely has few peers for a purely local story of such seeming insignificance. (See, for example, "Amendment to a Scheme", July 13, 1938, "Let the Dead Speak", July 18, 1938, "Who Owns It?", July 22, 1938, "Lame Excuse", July 28, 1938, "Cheap at the Price", July 30, 1938, and, even two years later, still carping about the exiguity of rest stops for the urbane living, in "Loud Silence", June 11, 1940.)

The little park was mentioned by Cash also in his April 1933 piece for The American Mercury, "Close View of a Calvinist Lhasa", as supplying "sedate beauty" in an otherwise "commonplace and modern" scene spanning downtown Charlotte, and was even romanticized as a place worthy of the French landscape painter, in "Out of Corot", March 30, 1938.

As the churchyard is but a four-block walk to the Frederick along North Church Street, where Cash took up residence in late 1937 after a short stint at the Selwyn Hotel, he undoubtedly knew the place well. As a space resemblant of the Shelby Courthouse square where he had found refuge for a bit beneath the shade tree of an afternoon, it offers ready comparison. A small hollow amid the horns and plenty of the city in which to find a quieter moment to cogitate on the world and feed, or just be fed by, the fauna habituating the grounds, perhaps, as evidenced by the poetically Socratic dialogue had with the reticent but hardy anthropomorphized spirit of the hesitant hunter of provender on squirely tootsie-foots within the scene confronting him on a snowy day, chronicled in "Quandary", January 26, 1940.

The plot of ground in question appears as below, the two photographs having been blinked in October, 1998.