The paths in Hickory Hill Park were covered in leaves, and Oakland Cemetery was full of deer — whole families, plodding in the grass, lying down — when my wife and I began our search. We’ve walked through there so many times, but coming with a mission, it seemed that we’d hardly seen any of it.
We wanted to find the gravestone of Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd, the novelist born in Iowa City in 1868 to noted abolitionists Walter Hoyt and Louisa Smith. In the style of Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris, Brainerd wrote serialized narratives that appeared in newspapers all over the country — often short stories about precocious Midwestern girls on adventure in the big city. She also wrote for magazines in New York and reported on fashion in Paris. Of her 10 novels, three of them were turned into silent films. She retired in California, dying at the age of 75.
Brainerd was the type of person who, if she attended dinner, would be the subject of an article the next morning. But her obituary came on the other side of her career, almost 15 years after her last publication, and it’s more like a missive, collapsing her life into a handful of facts: author, educator, died in Pasadena.
It took us half an hour, going from stone to stone, brushing leaves off the downtrodden ones, before we found her among the family plot. It seemed that it couldn’t have been more obvious. I had been walking past Brainerd’s resting place my entire life, on my way to see the Black Angel.
Only two miles away from her grave is the home in which she grew up, Plum Grove — off Kirkland Avenue, behind a fence and tall bushes, looking almost like a brick schoolhouse. Plum Grove is where Robert Lucas, first governor of the Iowa Territory, retired with his wife, Friendly, in 1842. It was put on the historic registry in 1946 and restored to the way Lucas left it. What that meant for me, going in there, was that it looked similar to the way the Hoyt family must have found it in 1866 — the way that Eleanor would have first known it.
This article is from Little Village’s December 2025 Peak Iowa issue, a collection of stories drawn from Hawkeye State history, culture and legend. Browse dozens of Peak Iowa tales here.
