Eddie Lanham, a man who understands

the pull of powerful but unseen forces and how the inevitable passing

of time can cloud even the best of memories, steadied the 130-pound white,

marble headstone on its edge with one hand while he leveled the ground

with the other.

"A lot of people who set

a headstone don't realize this, but you don't need to dig out a place

in the dirt," Lanham said. "You just level it off and set the

headstone down and let gravity sink it. If you dig it out too deep, in

about 20 years it'll be covered with weeds."

We stood in the middle of a

grassy hill under a large oak tree where a raised, rock monument to Indian

Agent Col. Benjamin Hawkins marks his burial plot. Col. Hawkins, possibly

one of the most historically ignored personalities in our nation's history,

built his headquarters, known as the Indian Agency, on this site in 1801

in what is now Crawford County.

Here on his 8,000-acre compound,

Hawkins spent the remaining 15 years of his life in vain, trying desperately

to teach Creek Indians the skills necessary to integrate into the white

man's culture. It was a goal that was doomed, for white settlers were

intent to push the Creeks out of the region far beyond the Flint River

which flows just beyond the tree line on the west side of the hill.

To a passerby, it might have

been an odd sight to see the seven of us gathered around the 1816 gravesite

on this steamy Georgia morning in June 2002. Lanham, his wife Felicia,

his cousin Pat McLeod with his wife Beatrice, publisher and author Fred

Brown, Citizen photographer Beth Snipes and myself all here to witness

the setting of the headstone.

I shook my head in amazement

thinking of how we had come to this moment. I've known Eddie Lanham for

more than 20 years. At one time our children had played together; and

with our families, we had spent many weekends watching ball games, playing

tennis and socializing in Peachtree City. But children grow up and lives

constantly take new directions, and Eddie and I had lost contact for a

number of years.

Kneeling by the grave was

an Eddie I didn't know. Replacing the tennis court attire of our former

days were jeans, tee-shirt, leather hiking boots and a light blue ball

cap that read "Friends of the Hunley," the recently recovered

Confederate submarine that sank just outside Charleston Harbor in 1864.

Parked a few feet away was

his taupe-colored, Ford Excursion where a History Channel cap lay in the

middle of the dashboard. Just below, to the right of the steering wheel

and at his fingertips when he was at the wheel, a laptop computer was

mounted on a custom-made rack.

At this moment, its DeLorme

Street Atlas USA map software program was zoomed in on the Hawkins gravesite.

Hitched to the Excursion was a 6x12, shiny black, spotless, enclosed trailer

as big as a $19-a-day U-Haul, emblazoned with the name of his obsession,

"Historic Research & Preservation," and sporting decals

like "Save Our Battlefields" and "America Needs a Hero"

with a picture of Robert E. Lee.

This was an Eddie with interests

I had never realized: A history lover and an active historical preservationist

who spends numerous weekends scouring the countryside for old cemeteries

and preserving the graves of soldiers who had fought in the Revolutionary

War, War of 1812, Indian Wars and Civil War.

If the soldier whether Union

or Confederate, officer or enlisted did not have a headstone, Eddie ordered

one from the Veteran's Administration and set it. The count was now up

to 771.

What led up to this morning

at the Hawkins grave was a strange but rewarding series of events that

began when I received a letter from Eddie last December.

It seems he had just read "The

Flint River" guidebook that Fred Brown and I wrote last year, and

he was so intrigued with the character of Col. Hawkins that he and Felicia

"got up at the crack of dawn and drove to the grave of Col. Hawkins,

overlooking the river."

After returning home, Eddie

ordered a marble headstone with Hawkins's rank and service information

and planned to set it at the foot of his grave.

Eddie's letter was one of the

most gratifying we had ever received about one of our books. Here was

a reader, an old friend, who had read the book and been moved to take

an action. I promised myself that I would call or write Eddie about it.

It was April by the time I

found myself near Jordan Homes, the homebuilding company that Eddie owns

in Peachtree City, and decided to drop by.

"You won't believe what

I just picked up this afternoon and have in the back of my truck,"

said Eddie as he walked me outside. There was Col. Hawkins's headstone.

We agreed that Fred and I would

accompany him and Felicia to set the headstone in June. Adding to the

bizarreness of the headstone's arrival was an e-mail from Eddie a few

weeks later saying that his cousin was coming up from Gainesville, Fla.,

and would go with us to set the headstone.

It seems Pat McLeod was the

great-great-great-grandson of Murdock McLeod, Benjamin Hawkins's head

surveyor. "We realized it," said Pat, "when Eddie and I

were doing family research. Murdock lived in Bryan County, just west of

Savannah, and traveled back and forth across the Georgia frontier to work

with Hawkins."

McLeod's work also took him

into the Indian Territory to retrieve stolen goods from Indian raids.

McLeod had died from consumption the same year as Hawkins, 1816.

Over the years Eddie and Felicia

have traveled from South Carolina to Texas, carrying and setting more

than 750,000 pounds of marble headstones.

A couple years ago, they set

one for an unknown Union soldier in Heard County. The soldier, probably

from Indiana, had been a part of McCook's Raid, which passed through Fayette

County. The soldier fought the Battle of Brown's Mill below Newnan and

later died at Felicia's great-great-grandfather Jacob Brown's plantation.

The Lanhams located the gravesite

under a huge poplar tree on the family property. Part of their research

had been based on an article in Brown's Guide to Georgia published by

Fred more than 20 years ago.

So on this summer morning,

I had followed Eddie and his entourage from Brooks in south Fayette County

down to where Ga. Highway 128 crosses the Flint River. A man with a quest:

a soldier to be honored.

After leveling the dirt, Eddie

carefully laid the headstone on the ground. "Col. Benjamin Hawkins.

General George Washington's Staff, Revolutionary War. Aug. 15, 1754. Jun

6, 1816."

Perching his glasses on his

nose, he then read the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) location coordinates

to Felicia as she recorded them in her notebook: "North 32 degrees

40 minutes 441 seconds. West 84 degrees 5 minutes 471 seconds."

"Got it," said Felicia,

closing her notebook. We silently walked away from the gravesite.

I have wondered since what

makes a person do something like this. What inner drive makes one seek

out America's war dead and quietly order a headstone with personal money

and spend another weekend morning placing it?

"Eddie and I like standing

in a spot thinking about what was here 150, 200 years ago," said

Felicia. "We like to think about the people who lived here people

like Hawkins and what they did with their lives and how they made our

country what it is today."

Some might call it an obsession,

but I think it's patriotism, that powerful, unseen gravitational force

that pulls us