In a quite corner of the Elmwood Cemetery, Memphis’ oldest active, is the grave of a 21 year old woman who died after childbirth on February 1, 1876.
Kate McCormick, whose real name was Kate Simpson, was a “handsome young woman of about twenty-one years of age” from Humboldt, Tennessee. Kate was seduced and made pregnant by a shoemaker named George Burgess, who was her father’s friend, under the false promise of marrying her. When he failed to follow through, Kate was so disgraced that she left her hometown and came to Memphis.
Three weeks before Christmas, Kate came to Dr. Johnson in Memphis and told him her story and asked the doctor to abort her child. Dr. Johnson later told the court that he had advised her not to commit abortion as it was against the law, and she went away. Three weeks later, on a Saturday night, Kate secured a room at a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Widrig, where she delivered a dead baby girl the following morning. When Mrs. Widrig learned that Dr. Johnson had been attending her, her suspicions were aroused and she asked Katie to tell her the whole truth. Kate broke down and confessed.
“Mrs. Widrig, I think my time is short,” she told Mrs. Widrig. “Dr. Johnson gave the medicine to destroy my child; tell Dr. Johnson that I promised not to deceive him or tell any person but the time has come when I can keep the secret no longer; I paid Dr. Johnson twenty-five dollars for the medicine; he gave me the medicine some three weeks ago and said if it did not work in six days it would be a failure; I took the medicine from Dr. Johnson to kill my child and paid him twenty-five dollars for it.'"
Kate died a short while later. An inquest was held and the jury found Dr. Johnson guilty of murder by committing an abortion. There is no mention of what penalty he was given nor, of course, any information on what drug he gave her that killed her. Note, too, that $25.00 in 1875 is equivalent to approx. $600.00 today and this was just for “medicine.”
Unsurprisingly (though despicably), there is no mention whatsoever of any penalty or even censure for the man (“a friend of her father’s”) who seduced her and then left her alone and pregnant.
Worst of all, in my eyes, is that her family would not even allow her to be buried in the same town where they lived.
More than a hundred years later, in 1997, a newspaper reporter and a “kind-hearted saloonist" became her “benefactors,” purchasing a headstone for her and writing the kind words that were, according to the article, probably kinder to her mother than was deserved.
There are no doubt many thousands of graves of women caught in similar situations
More here: The Sad Grave of Kate McCormick