Driving through Big Bend National Park about half way between the Persimmon Gap Entrance Station and the Panther Junction Visitors Center you will pass a marker that says exhibit ahead. Pulling off you find no interpretive plaques, just a narrow trail leading back into the desert scrub. At the end of the trail is a simple, single grave site where you learn it is the grave of Nina Hannold. There is a small plaque that gives a few facts, but just what is the story behind what you are seeing?
Nina Seawell who was born in 1880, was described as beautiful, intelligent and ambitious, a young woman with dreams of becoming a doctor. Then in 1901 she met and married Curtis Hannold, a school teacher by trade, who was widowed with one child, and who had come west from Ohio, drawn by the dream of owning his own land. Lured by the exciting, colorful and often exaggerated stores of homestead land in Texas, the family set off for the Texas frontier. Maybe Nina wasn't going to get her wish to become a doctor, but she was going to be able to go on the adventure of a lifetime.
Homesteading near Cottonwood Springs, in what is now the Park, they began to discover just how much work it took to survive in this land. This included hunting, trapping, trading, selling horses and livestock, as well as ranching. In order to supplement their income, Curtis taught school nearby at Dugout Wells, while Nina tended to both the ranch and the children. Yet even with the hard day to day life, they grew to love the area and became determined to stay and make a success of it.
One of Nina's pleasures was to sit in the shade of the cottonwoods near the spring and read to her children. It was this act which lead to her grave being in the lonely place it is today. Within a few years the family had grow include two more children, with a third on the way. That was when tragedy struck, as during the pregnancy Nina came down with uremic poisoning. Today we call it kidney failure, but without our modern treatments, the result was a slow death. It was as she was dying that Nina made her last request, "to be buried on this hill overlooking the spring where she had often read to the children in the shade of the cottonwoods."
Yesterday there were children playing and a mother reading, today only a lonely grave surrounded by a modern, but rusting, metal fence marks the spot. The homestead and the cottonwoods, and even the spring are gone. One small reminder of the past is the old stone slab which is mounted just behind the marble headstone. Nina looked out over this land and saw opportunity, when we look at her grave site, do we see a desolate forlorn place in the desert, or do we see into the past, and the dreams of a young woman on the frontier.
View of the area of th gravesite.
View of the gravesite.
The headstone.
The old marker.
Here are several links that provide information and further background about Nina, her family an the gravesite, here and here.