I am from Fayette County, WV. There is a family cemetery at Mount Olive, where many of my ancestors are buried. My family settled on Mount Olive in the 1840s. Away from the other graves is a beautiful, white tombstone. It belongs to Allen Allstock. Also referred to as Ailstock. He was born in 1839 and died in 1883. The stone reads,”Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down. He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not”. My great grandfather said that Allen was a freed slave and the only black man buried in the cemetery. We always decorated his grave, along with decorating our own families’. But I always wondered about Allen. As I grew older, i asked my professors about it. They said he must have had some great importance to have such a nice tombstone. I looked through census records and all I found was that he lived in Nicholas in 1860. Between 1870 and 1880, he moved to Mount Olive. He was a farmer and never married. I never found anything else. That was ten years ago. I always wondered about him. Why was he there?
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