The Timber Road: How One Secret Funeral Shaped a Town's Shame

The Timber Road: How One Secret Funeral Shaped a Town's Shame

A nine-foot road with no deed, no tire tracks and shoebox-sized fieldstones placed at twelve-foot intervals led Rachel Richardson into a secret used for 126 years-why would a town build a burial route it never officially acknowledged? What does one hidden funeral say about who was allowed to be visible in Mossfield?

In this episode, we tell the sequence of events that began in September 1841 with Lisa Ward’s death and extended into the present through discoveries made between 2019 and 2021; we follow the physical evidence at Aldenmere Cemetery and the archival traces that reveal who decided she would travel the timber way, and ask how a community could regulate access to something it denied existed.

Person: Rachel Richardson Person: Lisa Ward Date: September 17, 1841 Location: Aldenmere Cemetery, Mossfield, Indiana Author: Grant Reed

- The timber road is nine feet wide with packed gray clay showing faint wagon-axle ruts. - Fieldstones are placed at roughly twelve-foot intervals: 28 on the left side and 27 on the right. - Lisa Ward was 24 years old, unmarried, mother of an infant who died, and listed in church records as dying of puerperal fever. - Margaret Oller recorded watching lanterns move through the trees the morning of the burial in a diary that sat uncatalogued for 35 years. - Grant Reed spent four years preparing before examining the logbook and documented discoveries in research completed between 2019 and 2021.

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