The historical marker stood on US 69, north of Lindale, Texas, just where the old highway met the new one. Just before the road got to the Sabine River bottoms, there was a marker. Then one day it was just gone, the post sawed off at ground level, and now the entire site has been included in the re-paving work on the highway itself.
I saw it one day, and resolved to bring a camera on the next trip down the road. When I did, I found the cut pipe post, and the marker gone.
What had it memorialized? the area just west of the highway was a rather level field, where a small "force" had gathered, spent the night, and made an early morning attack to wipe out an Indian group camped somewhere a few miles to the west. The historical marker had the old language of the Indian wars. Which someone, unknown, decided it was time to stop remembering. And so, the marker disappeared. I wondered for a long time if it would come back. It seems gone for good.
Time does that. A grand old idea becomes a bit of an embarrassment, and history is edited. When we traveled in Europe this fall, we found Germans that were passionately and totally angry at Hitler. Hitler's Mein Kampf is no longer a legal document in Germany, only graduate history students can buy a copy. Hitler's monuments are preserved only as lessons on what NOT to do as responsible citizens. Concentration camps are preserved as penitent reminders of horror.
Perhaps God uses the passage of time to let us get our history straight, to drop the old embarrassments of human nature, and to make a fresh start. It seems a slow process, but it does move us forward, perhaps in His own good time.
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