Elizabeth Polly

Service and death In 1867, Fort Hays was established on a low slope south of Big Creek, its role being to provide security for the Smoky Hill Trail. For the most part, the "fort" was still just a bivouac of hundreds of tents in the late summer of 1867 when it became the center of a war with the plains tribes over the construction of the Kansas Pacific Railway parallel to the trail.

Ephraim Edward Polly was a Civil War veteran who enlisted in the 1st Colorado Cavalry Regiment on Sept 11, 1861. Ephraim separated from the Army on Aug 23, 1865, and then, around age 24-25, reenlisted as a hospital steward, or male nurse. He served in that position in the early months of the U.S. Army encampment at the newly established Fort Hays.

With the maiden name Decker, Elizabeth is identified as Ephraim Polly's wife from a c. 1864 marriage. As would be common for wives of hospital stewards, Elizabeth served as a hospital matron.

By August 1867, a cholera epidemic had broken out among the tents of over 1000 troops. The cholera soon spread to the 1200 railroad construction workers who were sheltering near the camp in the new village of Rome,

When it was apparent that she had contracted the disease herself, she pleaded with her husband to bury her on top of that hill. Upon her death, soldiers were detailed to dig her grave on the crest of Sentinel Hill; but only inches beneath the sod they struck massive limestone bedrock.

"The Lonely Grave" A long-standing mystery in the county is the location of Elizabeth's supposed lost grave.

One tradition for her gravesite is that there was no tombstone, possibly only two wooden planks, barely readable years later, from which was reportedly read her name (Elizabeth), her birth date (1843), and her birthplace, (Liberty). From the idea that Elizabeth came from Liberty, Missouri, comes a story that a decade after her death, her grave was inspected by an incognito visitor from Liberty, Jesse James, presumably on behalf of Elizabeth's surviving relatives. That the grave had no durable markers suggests a reason her grave was lost.

Another tradition holds that her gravesite was lost because it was marked by four limestone posts, supposedly stolen by a matching number of four thieves. The legend claims that tragedy found each of the thieves in the hours after the theft: one felled in a gunfight, two killed in a carriage accident, and the other hit by a train. If the grave was indeed marked by posts made from the particular bedrock limestone from "Elizabeth's Hill", the soldiers would not have been aware that Fort Hays Limestone posts crumble and rot away in a number of years.

Regardless of how her grave may have been marked, the site would have been separate from the military reservation and not within the fort's military and civilian cemeteries. When the fort was closed 22 years later, the soldiers' remains were relocated to Fort Riley or Fort Leavenworth, while civilian graves were moved to the north of Hays City, but no known grave for Elizabeth Polly was moved. Her spirit is said to still walk Sentinel Hill, also called Elizabeth Polly Hill and Blue Light Lady Hill, looking for soldiers to comfort

Elizabeth Polly Park was established by the city of Hays in 1982, featuring the Peter Felten, Jr., sculpture Elizabeth Polly.