Members of the Gage family from near and far gathered for little Dorothy’s funeral including little Dorothy’s Aunt Maud who had taken a train to get to Bloomington.  For reasons that remain unclear, little Dorothy’s Uncle Frank did not attend the funeral.  The death and funeral were terribly sad, as you would expect.  Maud hid her grief as much as she could while she was with her family in Bloomington.  None of the other passengers on her return train trip home were aware of her grief.  When Uncle Frank picked her up at the train station, she seemed to crumble.  For days Aunt Maud was in a terrible state.  Uncle Frank wanted to ease Aunt Maud’s suffering but there was nothing he could do.  Or was there?

During one of Dr. Wagner and Matilda’s many conversations, Matilda mentioned little Dorothy’s grave.  Did little Dorothy’s headstone still exist?  Dr. Wagner visited the Evergreen Memorial Cemetery to search for little Dorothy’s grave.  What seemed like a simple task at first turned out to be a formidable undertaking.  The cemetery consisted of over 20,000 marked graves and there was an unknown number of unmarked graves.  Finally, Dr. Wagner found seven headstones with the last name Gage, but little Dorothy’s grave was not among them.  Was her grave unmarked?  Was Dr. Wagner looking in the right cemetery?  Undeterred, Dr. Wagner continued the search.  At last, Dr. Wagner found a small headstone with the following inscription:  Dorothy Louise, Dau. Of Mr. & Mrs. T.C. Gage, June 11, 1898, Nov. 11, 1898. 

Little Dorothy’s tiny headstone was lost in a sea of over 20,000 headstones.  Something more was needed.  In 1997, people gathered at the Evergreen Memorial Cemetery for a ceremony to open the Dorothy L. Gage Memorial Garden which included a new, larger headstone in memory of the almost forgotten child.  Still, it seemed that something more was needed, but what?  Twenty years later, in 2017, officials at Evergreen Memorial Cemetery decided that an old oak tree near little Dorothy’s grave had to be removed.  The tree was around 200 years old.  Cemetery officials saw this as a unique opportunity.  Could this oak tree somehow memorialize little Dorothy?  In June 2018, officials at the cemetery hired Bill Baker of Top Notch Chainsaw Carving to carve the tree stump into the figure of a little girl with a dog at her feet standing on a road.  Since then, thousands of people have visited little Dorothy’s grave. 

Shortly after little Dorothy’s death, Uncle Frank struggled to find a way to ease Aunt Maud’s sadness.  Two years later, he found a way.  Under any other circumstances, little Dorothy, the child who died at just five months old, would have been forgotten just as her grave had been lost.  Uncle Frank found a way to immortalize his niece when he named the lead character in a children’s story after her.  You see, Dr. Wagner’s research of the Gage family was because of little Dorothy’s connection to Uncle Frank, L. Frank Baum, the author of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

Sources:

1.     The Pantagraph (Bloomington, Illinois), June 26, 2018, p.A3.

2.      “Dorothy Louise Gage (1898-1898), Find a Grave,” www.findagrave.com, Accessed March 17, 2024.https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/4083/dorothy_louise_gage.