The Last Tomb

Following a family line into the mountains of Pennsylvania.

My journey toward the past and its peoples began with this photograph.

Let me introduce you: this is Mildred Evelyn Tomb. In this photograph, I would guess she is seventeen, probably no older than eighteen years old. This portrait was undoubtedly taken in Corning, New York, and if it is what I think it may be—a senior portrait of some kind—then she would have been in her final year of Northside High School.

Though she spent most of her life in Corning, she was born in Pennsylvania, in the village of Slate Run, along Pine Creek in the Allegheny Mountains on March 24, 1900. She would have been born at home, probably with the aid of a midwife; the nearest hospital was more than forty miles downstream in the lumber town of Williamsport, on the West Branch of the Susquehanna River. There was no state highway in 1900, only the railroad which was, by then, less than twenty years old. The railroad would become, by 1914, the New York Central, where her father, Irvin Cornelius Tomb, would work.

This is only one of three remaining photos, to my knowledge, of Mildred as a young woman. The first, when she was probably two years old, must have been taken in one of the larger towns, probably Jersey Shore, which lay at the mouth of Pine Creek. Within a few years, if she started school, it would have been at the one-room schoolhouse in Slate Run, that sat on a knoll on the east shore of Pine Creek. Not far from the schoolhouse was the Methodist Church, behind which is the graveyard where some of her ancestors are buried. The patriarch, Jacob Tome, who arrived at the mouth of Slate Run in 1791 with his family and tools in canoes, is buried further up the creek, on a ridge above Cedar Run.

At some point, my second-great-grandparents, Irvin and Martha, moved the family to Corning, New York, which lay on a hub of the railway lines. I would imagine that the economy of Slate Run was, by then, dwindled. Coal seams to the west may have been mined out, and the lumber was mostly gone—the mill that sat on the shore across from Jacob’s old homestead would be closed soon enough and dismantled. Corning had modern conveniences: schools, hospitals, shops, churches, and photography studios.

The second of the remaining photographs was taken, I would guess, in Corning, at any one of the working portraitists at the time, though it could well have been taken in Jersey Shore, or Williamsport. I’ll never be sure. I would guess in this photograph Mildred was perhaps ten, even as old as twelve. I found it in a thin brass frame, cut indelicately from what must have been a rectangular cabinet card.

I don’t know exactly when they left Slate Run, but certainly prior to 1915, when on July 3rd, the Williamsport Sun-Gazette reported “Miss Mildred Tomb, of Corning, N.Y., is visiting relatives and friends here.” On August 2nd, they reported she had gone home. A few years later, on April 24th, 1917, the paper reported that she was spending time with relatives, and again on June 18th of 1917, when “Miss Mildred Tomb, of Corning, has returned home after spending the week-end with friends in this place.” She went often enough, it seems. The fact that newspapers of the day considered things like this news is astonishing, if not amusing.

On December 19th, 1919, she married my great-grandfather, Michael Aloysius Flynn, whose parents had emigrated from the village of Castleisland in County Kerry, Ireland. Mildred and Michael were married in St. Patrick’s Church, where she was a member of the parish aides. My grandmother, Mary Catharine, was born in 1925. They lived in a house on Oak Street, near the Chemung River, with an apple tree in the yard. In 1972, the house was destroyed by a flood.

The only other information I initially had of Mildred comes from her obituary—she died on December 8th, 1972, just a few weeks before my second birthday—published, I believe, in the Corning Leader or perhaps the Elmira Star-Gazette. It reads that she was a member of the women’s auxiliaries of both the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen (both her husband and father-in-law worked for the railroads) and the American Legion Post. She died of “an extended illness” in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Elmira and was buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery, following the Mass of the Resurrection.

That’s all I knew of Mildred Flynn, née Tomb. The photograph of her as a teen, when I first saw it, was on my father’s wall. Somewhere around the time he had cancer, he’d asked me what I wanted left to me in his will. The question unsettled me, but I answered, only the photographs. There were others I admired, but hers was astonishing.

When I made the down payment on my house in Louisville, Kentucky with money my father had left me, I hung her portrait outside my daughter’s bedroom. Years later, in the summer of 2020, on the solstice, sitting on my couch in meditation, the image came to me. I took it off the wall and examined it.

Mildred was the last of countless generations to bear the name Tomb (pronounced tome) before she became a Flynn, and her daughter Mary became a Hill, the name I wear. Tomb is, I would soon discover, a German name.

I took a book from my closet, an album my father had had made of his family tree. I looked up Mildred and saw that she was born in Slate Run, though at the time, I had no idea where that was. By that summer, I would travel to the Pennsylvania mountains, and in the years to come, I would discover more about her history, and all of our histories: her ancestors, as well as my grandmother, my father, and myself.

Recently I wrote my cousin, Michael Hill, in Alaska. He’s a few years older than me, and he remembers visiting Mildred’s house, seeing her canned goods in the cellar and eating apples from the tree. Our aunt gave him Mildred’s cast iron pan, which he treasures.

What, I’ve asked myself, did she leave me?

Four years ago, on the summer solstice, I decided to write a book. This year, I set out to explore questions like this in order to bring that book to life.