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| Likely the house occupied by Regina Bernhard |
much ignored anything after about 1900. I've since changed my ways, and good thing, too, because an adventurous reader recently brought to my attention a very interesting, and very 20th Century, story. Its physical manifestation here is fairly unique for us, and the family's story is both very typical and kind of unusual.
While Casey was walking one of the White Clay Creek State Park trails near the Judge Morris Estate a while back, she came across some burials in the woods. No this isn't the start of a new Stephen King novel -- it was a small, family cemetery. When she looked closer, she expected to see old, worn headstones dating back a couple hundred years, much like those not all that far away at the old White Clay Creek Presbyterian graveyard. However, though the wrought iron fencing, she was surprised to see newer, mostly mid-20th Century headstones. The story of whose they are and why they're there is one we only mostly understand.
The cemetery belongs to the Bernhard family, as does (apparently) the 2 acre lot it sits on, located on the south side of Old Coach Road between Polly Drummond Hill Road and Upper Pike Creek Road. And though I actually have very briefly mentioned the Bernhard family once before in a post, the "Bernhard" family did not exist prior to about 1914. However, Bernard Steigelfest was born in 1866 in Rzeszow, in what's now southeastern Poland, but what was then part of the Austrian Empire. Although the town was largely Polish and about half the population was Jewish, as far as I can tell the Steigelfest family was ethnically German.
