We finished our hiking at Devil’s Lake SP at about 3 in the afternoon and headed into Baraboo for something to eat. Not so long ago, that would have meant parking ourselves at a restaurant for a meal. Though there are no restrictions on indoor dining in Wisconsin now — the whole kit and kaboodle was thrown out — we thought better of it, and ordered takeout.

That left us about 20 minutes to wait for the food. Rather than wait in the car in the restaurant parking lot, I consulted Google maps and found a nearby place to go: the 52-acre Walnut Hill Cemetery, which has about 11,500 permanent residents. Baraboo, the Census Bureau tells me, has a shade over 12,100 living residents.

It’s a pleasant cemetery.

I hadn’t come to see any specific grave, but I had to investigate one of the few mausoleums I saw, there on a small rise.

It turned out to be the resting place of Al. Ringling (1852-1916), the eldest of the circus family, and his wife Lou. Makes sense. Baraboo was a circus town, after all.

Later I read that some of the other circus brothers are buried at Walnut Hill as well, but I didn’t spot them. I did see another intriguing stone.

JOHN DUCKENS
Born a slave in Kentucky
Died in Baraboo, Wi 1894
Aged 75 years

A new-looking stone at that. It’s a replacement for a weather-worn original, put there only in 2011 by the Sauk County Historical Society, which published a sketch of his life — probably all that’s possible — as a Sauk County Notable.