The City of Elmira has a really cool way to greet visitors coming down Church Street from I-86. Just as you reach the edge of the built-up section, you find a billboard from which a number of interesting faces gaze down on you. These are a century and a half of famous Elmirans, welcoming you to their city.
One of these faces is probably recognized by just about everyone, although he’s been gone since the 1910 passage of Halley’s Comet: the face of Samuel Clemens. In Woodlawn Cemetery you can find his grave, topped by a column that rises in height to twelve feet – two fathoms, or Mark Twain.
Why should Mark Twain lie in Elmira, rather than in Hannibal, Buffalo, Hartford, or San Francisco? Mark Twain’s wife Libbie Langdon was an Elmiran, and the couple typically spent their summers here. The family built him a lovely octagonal study, which you can now visit at Elmira College. Here he wrote Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper, and that titanic American novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Go to Elmira, spend the summer, write a book – that was Mark Twain’s routine.
It’s too bad that more people don’t recognize the connection. Jared Aiosa, at Heroes Your Mom Threw Out in Elmira Heights, recommended to me the stunning graphic novel series The Unwritten. A significant event in the first volume concerns a meeting between Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, for which the artist created a large, detailed, lovingly-meticulous illustration of Mark Twain’s house in Hartford. The meeting DID take place historically, but it was at Quarry Farm in Elmira.
A few steps away in Woodlawn Cemetery is the grave of Mark Twain’s friend John Jones… also a figure on the billboard. John Jones worked at Woodlawn for many years as caretaker for the many graves of Confederate P.O.W.s, tending them with conscientious care and meticulous record-keeping. It was once a custom for southern visitors to honor the graves of their dead, then place a Confederate flag on the grave of John Jones in appreciation of his care.
No doubt he’d have appreciated their appreciation, but they apparently didn’t realize that a Confederate flag wouldn’t likely have been welcome. John Jones escaped from Leesburg, Virginia where he was a slave, freeing himself… as Frederick Douglass said, stealing himself… from the people, indeed the society, that classified him with the hogs and the chairs. He had no legal “right” to do so, and so lived for decades, even in New York, under the specter of being kidnapped and returned.
But he didn’t keep a low profile, becoming a well known figure in both the black community and the overall community. He figured that had personally helped 700 people escape. So he probably wouldn’t have been enthusiastic about those Confederate flags.
Mark Twain, when he was young and foolish, briefly bore arms for the Confederacy. In later years he was one of the few prominent white Americans who rejected and fought against the prevailing habitual fabric of white supremacy. So it’s quite a shock that when the Ku Klux Klan held a major regional rally at Chemung County Fairgrounds, one of the optional side trips they laid on was a visit to the grave of Mark Twain. Of course, they were never mistaken for deep thinkers. It’s just as well for them that he’d been dead for 15 years. His reaction no doubt would have been volcanic.
Also at Woodlawn we find the grave of a third figure from the billboard – Number 44, Ernie Davis. There are still those here who knew him and loved him… a standout athlete at Elmira Free Academy in the 1950s, and then at Syracuse University, where he became the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy as the most outstanding college football player for the year.
Mark Twain and John Jones helped forge opportunities for Ernie Davis, but if he had a starting point a little farther forward than he would have had a few years earlier, he still had to fight his way from there. George Marshall was marketing the Washington Redskins as “the” football team of the south, complete with rebel yells and Confederate flags, and he absolutely did not want a black player on his team. Pressure from the N.F.L. and the Interior Department (which owned the stadium) forced him to draft Ernie Davis, but Ernie solved his problem with a single straightforward sentence: “I will not work for that S.O.B.”
Marshall quickly traded him to the Cleveland Brown, where his story morphed from a saga to a tragedy. This incredible athlete was diagnosed with leukemia, and passed away without ever playing a professional game.
As a sports story, an Elmira story, and a civil rights story, the life of Ernie Davis would already be memorable. But by all reports he was a tremendous personality, and an outstanding human being. That’s really why his memory is so dearly treasured today. A couple of years back I took a New England group staying in Elmira on a trip to Sonnenberg Gardens. I told them local history stories on the way, after which one of the guests came up excitedly to say, “I was in R.O.T.C. summer camp with Ernie Davis at Fort Devens!” The fact that that brief encounter still meant so much, so many years later, speaks volumes about Ernie Davis.
So the billboard… and Woodlawn Cemetery… encapsulate much of the racial history of America. Next week, we’ll look at the other faces on the board.