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David C. Ralston spent part of his youth in Knox County and is buried here today. He was a key figure in the U.S. Signal Corps’ early studies of weather, which is how he came to be selected for the polar expedition that was to take his life.
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Lieutenant Adolphus Greeley was the leader of the polar research expedition officially known as the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition after the geographical location where their research would be focused.
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The USS Proteus was the ship that took the explorers to northern Greenland in the summer of 1881. Trying to reach them through ice two years later, the ship was crushed and sank.
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The Proteus deposited the explorers at Lady Franklin Bay, on the upper northeast corner of Ellesmere Island, across the straight from the northern tip of Greenland. The team built a number of buildings for living and working, which they named Fort Conger.
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This illustration of one of the work buildings at Fort Conger ran in a magazine covering the 1884 disaster that befell the stranded explorers.
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Rescuers only managed to reach the survivors of the expedition in 1884, three years after they were deposited in the Arctic.
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This somewhat hokey diorama was a display built for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, reflecting the hold this dramatic story still had on the public almost a decade later.
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Lewis and Mary Ralston lived in this house in Howard along with their son William H. Ralston, who worked as a store clerk and served as Howard’s postmaster at the time. William was also the one who traveled to New York City to accompany the shipment of his brother’s body to Howard for burial. Later in 1884, William was elected a Knox County commissioner.
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The Disciple Church sat a couple miles outside of Howard about halfway up a hillside on Curtis Road. The site is today just above the waterline of Apple Valley Lake.
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The church site was approximately where the grove of brush sits between the beach and the Old Drake/Jelloway Cemetery. Foundation rocks from the small church can still be found at the edge of the cemetery.
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Technically, the Old Jelloway/Drake burial ground is a cemetery, the correct term for a burial ground without an adjacent church. It was originally a graveyard to the church. Today the site overlooks Apple Valley Lake.
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A gray granite obelisk in the Old Jelloway/Drake Cemetery marks the burial site of polar explorer Sergeant David Columbus Ralston and his parents.
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Lt. Greely sits in the center of the front row of this group portrait. Due to changing personnel, some members were added later, and the expedition member who was executed was apparently later papered over with the face of a member picked up in Greenland. These crude photo alterations are easily visible to the modern eye.
Newspack Team More by adminnewspack