In the mountains of western North Carolina, in the Tabor Cemetery on a knoll in the Brush Creek Community, there are two five foot tall marble monuments in the shape of obelisks, marking the graves of Nathan Tabor and his wife, Elizabeth Condra. The remarkable story of how these markers got where there are appeared in The Atlanta Journal and the Asheville Citizen Times in 1965.
The monuments were stored in a barn in Tate. When Sherman made his infamous march through Georgia, burning everything in his path, the old barn where the monuments were stored was burned to the ground. The records of where the monuments were to be shipped was burned too.
For sixty-eight years, the monuments lay in the ashes of that fire, forgotten. Then, in 1928 a chance uncovering led to a search for the rightful owners. A descendant of the Tabors, Miss Hattie Tabor of Jasper, Georgia, identified the stones from the inscriptions and contacted her cousins in North Carolina. John DeHart Tabor made arrangements to have them delivered and installed at the gravesite where they were originally intended to be. Traces of the fire are still visible on the white marble.
Nathan Tabor died in 1851. Elizabeth died nine years later in 1860. The family ordered the monuments from the Tate Marble Company in Tate, Georgia. However, before the monuments could be delivered, the Civil War broke out in all its fury. The railroads were shut down, and transportation of non-essentials came to a halt.
