By Bill Seymour
June 5, 2025
The Independent/About South County Column
 

Lying flat against the dirt ground, on a steep, wooded, and weed-infested slope next to an old railroad bed and along a cemetery's edge, are two indistinct gravestones.

 They are hidden by tall, drooping weeds, shadowing them as much as they cover Senta and Gustav Walter below them.

 The railroad bed is now the William C. O'Neill Bike Path. I travel it to Kingston and back on my bike regularly. This slope sits above the path and, in the early spring, is bare with decaying leaves from the winter cover of snow, but more often rainwater or just general wind-blown debris of sticks and other tangles.

 As spring arrives, so too do the weeds. This still-naked slope has behind it thousands of graves in the privately owned 155-year-old Riverside Cemetery. Its headstones rise tall as sentinels guarding the bodies or ashes under the neatly manicured lawn surrounding them.

 In this historical cemetery, as in scores of others across the country, some stones are broken, faded, covered with algae, lichen, and fungi. Words, names, dates, and testimonials are lost to weathering time.

 They bend and fall after decades or centuries by the unyielding elements each season or after a once-certain foundation gives way to the frailties of the ever-shifting ground. Vandals sometimes do their damage, as well. Earth and the remains combine. After all, from dust we came, and to dust we shall return.

 For the last few years, in the early spring until the sprouting season snatches their visibility, I've seen these two stones in the covered slope, never knowing if they were toppled by vandals or just fallen pieces of granite rolling into this undergrowth of brush and brambles.

 This week, I decided to go look. I found a surprise. These are the truly forgotten and unattended graves of Senta Walter (May 24, 1884 - July 30, 1912, 28 years old) and her husband, Gustav Walter (July 20, 1860 - June 13, 1919, 58 years old).

 We've all seen these kinds of graves, lost to time and the disappearing relatives no longer alive to care for the graves of the dead or the failure to provide for perpetual care by the cemetery. It reminded me of our fleeting legacies.

 "I can't tell you the number of people who come into my shop and want to know how long a tombstone will last," says a monument-maker friend of mine.

 "I tell them I don't really know, but we can't even control the present; why worry about when we're dead? Everybody wants to keep on living, even after they're dead," he said, as later in the week we rode our bikes past Senta's and Gustav's graves.

 I lingered on that thought long after the bike ride, thinking about these two obscure graves dug over 100 years ago and now abandoned on a brush-and-weed-filled slope near a well-groomed cemetery.

 I went to our sister paper, The Narragansett Times, and looked up the Walters' obituaries.

 Mrs. Walter, who died from an "abscess on the brain," according to her obituary, had an infant son. Just before her funeral service, "The Rev. Mr. Allen baptized the infant son of the deceased beside the casket containing the mortal remains of its mother and christened him Richard Wagner Walter."

 "Interment was in Riverside Cemetery," it also said, noting she was a "woman with rare musical genius, her education in both vocal and instrumental music commencing at the age of six years." She studied in Berlin, Germany, and lived in Bethlehem, PA, with "Mr. Walter's mother, coming to Narragansett Pier shortly before her marriage to Mr. Walter."

 She also sang in public at the Pier "to all who were fortunate enough to hear her…she was ill less than 10 days…."

 Gustav died seven years later. "Gustav Walter dropped dead last Friday afternoon about six o'clock while walking the beach," according to his obituary.

 "He was in company with Dr. Charles A. White and while talking over some business matter, when he suddenly leaned toward Mr. White, who supported him from falling to the ground. By the time Mr. White has laid his companion on the ground he had expired," it said.

 "The body was removed to the police station and Dr. F.E. Burke was summoned at once, but the patient has passed away before he arrived…Mr. Walter has been out of town for the winter months and only returned the day previous to his death," the obituary continued.

 He had operated, according to the March 22, 1907, edition of The Narragansett Times, The Sea View House, "one of the oldest hotels at the Pier, having been built about 40 years ago (1867)…"

 His purchase that year of Sea View on Kingstown Road was highlighted as "the most important piece of news at the Pier this week…" He had previously operated a rooming house on Beach Street.

 When he died in 1919, the probate court sought to appoint guardians for Walter Walter, Homer Walter, and Richard Wagner Walter "minors, under the age of fourteen years…"

 For Senta and Gustav, all that remains are faint echoes—digital records unheard of in their lifetimes and two humble gravestones side by side in an overgrown corner by a busy bike path, where the living rush past, never knowing who they were.

 So it goes for all of us - we remain in the grip of time's uncontrollable forces.

 We can be forgotten.

 Bill Seymour covers news and feature stories throughout Southern Rhode Island. The views expressed in “About South County” are his own.