This beautiful park is on the campus of Emory University and can be reached off Clifton Avenue or Haygood Avenue. We easily found parking behind Woodruff Residential Center. I came here before with my daughter and her sons, Martin and Mathew. On that trip, Martin jumped up and down on the suspension bridge hanging high above a gulley while we were crossing and scared us. He promised not to do it today while we were crossing but he did jump a little and Boofa lay down on the bridge afraid to move. Anyway we had a good walk around a shining lake. I found a perfect walking stick and brought it home.
I told the boys that their great great great grandfather had graduated from medical school at Emory after the Civil War. This is the story: Before the war, Christopher Columbus Welsh had gone up to White Plains, New York for medical school, leaving his fiance, Mary Anna Ogburn at home in the country in Lancaster County, SC. We have a letter she wrote to him "at Plains" from which it is evident that he had told her they would not be able to get married right way because a war was coming. She obviously did not understand and wrote, "I did not think you would forsake me."
He left school, came home and joined the Confederate Army as a surgeon's assistant. After the war, he finished Medical School at Emory. He and Mary Anna married and their oldest child was my grandfather.
My mother said that her grandfather would travel on horseback far out into the country to treat the sick. He would be gone for days and often his horse would bring him home asleep in the saddle.
He did not live to be an old man, but died suddenly in his forties at a medical conference in
Baltimore. I read in a geneological book, that he fathered a child outside of marriage. Perhaps Mary Anna had reasons to feel forsaken.
Mathew and I watched the old movie, High Noon, this morning and it's haunting theme song is stuck in my head...."do not forsake me, oh my darlin".
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