This is the grave of Florence Kelley in the Price Cemetery. My father told me her story many years ago and I like to take her a white rose once a year so she will know not everybody had forgotten her. She was the 12th of a dozen children, and she was described as a "real beauty" with "auburn hair and a gentle face". She attended School at Frog Level (Kelley Gap), and was well known for her banjo playing. She fell in love and then her love was called to the Army. Following the sudden death of her mother she ran away to be with him. She got a job at Camp Stuart as a water boy for $2 a day and lived in the barracks. She went by the name of Mike. During the Liberty Loans Parade in Newport News she fell from the "automobile truck" (as the 1917 Greeneville Sun calls it) and was crushed. It was then they found she was a female. She lived for two days. The workmen collected enough funds to purchase a fancy white dress and a white coffin, with enough left to send her home to Greeneville for burial beside her mother. Before leaving Virginia over 3000 came to view her remains. Hundreds in Greene County paid their respects. Florence has this simple stone, and a few times I've had to uncover it. From her picture in the 1917 Greeneville Sun I know what she looks like, and the workers had quit calling her Mike and started calling her "Smiles" because "her smile was as refreshing as the water she distributed among the men". When I place a white rose on her stone, I can see her smile, in her white dress, because she knows she is not forgotten. I'm telling this because I have lost a lot of friends lately and sometimes I think of stories like this and think, does anybody else know this? Tim Massey
Family of James F. Kelly.