INDIA BELLE

Daughter of

JAMES R. and MAMIE

BALDWIN

Born Nov. 21. 1898

Died July 17

1903,

Aged 4 yrs.

8 Months

Beautiful, lovely,

She was but given,

A fair bud to earth,

To blossom in Heaven.

The white marble gravestone of India Belle Baldwin in the BPOE 216 (Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks) Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas, is topped with a lamb.  There are many gravestone symbols that seem to be ubiquitous in cemeteries—the lamb is one of them. Walk into nearly any American graveyard and you will find tiny little lambs marking the graves of mostly children.  The lambs come in many sizes and positions—often sleeping. But the lamb on the gravestone of four-year old India is raising its head up. The weather has eroded the details of the face of the lamb.

On the face of the gravestone, there is also an ivy trailing up the marker.  The ivy represents friendship and, like many symbols found in the cemetery, immortality.

Marking the grave is a long curbing outlining the burial plot which most likely was filled with blooming flowers until her caring parents themselves died. As her epitaph states, her flower didn’t bloom on earth but would do so in Heaven.