A lasting memorial

A group of Warren youngsters is learning history in the best way possible, by memorializing it.
The boys and girls, members of the Third Christian Church youth group, are raising money to place a stone on the unmarked grave of Charles Washington.
Washington was an escaped slave who made his way from Virginia to freedom by way of the Underground Railroad. He settled in Warren, where he died in 1900 of injuries suffered in a railroad accident and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery.
Members of the group are doing more than fund-raising. They are learning valuable lessons about Washington and men and women like him, about the hard lives they lived and about the contributions they made to society.
No man or woman should be forgotten, but certainly not a man such as Charles Washington, who risked his life for something we take for granted, freedom.
It will only be appropriate when a granite monument is placed on Washington's grave. But the greater testament to his life will be the youngsters in whose minds the story of Charles Washington will be forever engraved.