118 Years Later, 10-Year-Old's Grave Honored With Flowers, Dolls, Medals

The statue of a young girl atop the grave of Emma Ochsner is adorned with flowers and stuffed animals, a Rainbow Loom bracelet, rosaries, a religious medal and a scapular. The grave markers around it in Joliet’s Oakwood Cemetery are mostly bare, but more than a century after her death, there are those still paying their respects to the little girl.

Emma was just 10 when she died on July 2, 1897. The website Ochsners in America says Emma was walking down the street with her older brother, William, when she lost her life. They were on their way to watch a funeral procession.

Emma was “accidently killed by coming in contact with a guy wire holding up a telegraph pole,” Ochsners in America said.

“She was thrown completely over a fence and was killed instantly,” the site said. “The palms of her hands were badly burned. Her father was sent for immediately. Upon his arrival, Albert Ochsner noticed the wire and thought it must be electrified. In order to prove his assertion, he took hold of the wire. He was then thrown over the fence more than ten feet into the yard. He was unconscious for several minutes. His neck and hands were also burned.”

The statue over Emma’s grave stands on the west end of the cemetery just off Cass Street. While the marker appears to have been decorated with more mementos than those around it, Dave Apgar, the president of the cemetery board, said she is not the only one in Oakwood to receive visitors.

“There’s hundreds of gravesites people leave things at,” said Apgar.

“We have so many famous people, we’re like the ’who’s who’ of Joliet,” Apgar said of Oakwood.

Indeed, former board President Michael Sayles, the funeral director and owner of Carlson Holmquist Sayles Funeral Home, said visitors to the cemetery who are unfamiliar with Joliet’s past would be struck to see the headstones bearing the names of so many of the city’s streets.

“When you walk through there, it gives you the real history of Joliet,” Sayles said.

Among the historic notables buried in Oakwood are railroad baron William Cornelius Van Horne, Governor Joel Aldrich Matteson and Civil War Col. Frederick A. Bartleson.

Apgar said families have approached him while he is cutting the grass around his realtives’ graves in Oakwood and tell them the stories of their lost loved ones.

“I was like, ’Write it down,’” Apgar said.

“Write it down, send it to me, email it to me,” he said. “It would be interesting to have a record of the people out there.”

Oakwood was incorporated in 1855 but Apgar said the first burial conducted by those who settled in the region was in 1835.

“Obviously we have the Indians,” he said. “They were the first burials.”

Whoever has been leaving mementos on the grave of Emma Ochsner has never approached Apgar.

“I just always assumed it was family,” he said, “or friends of family.”