If you walk along Kesterwood Drive in Fountain City, you’ll come to a grand stone wall in front of a grand stone house that sits on 2.3 acres and faces southeast down Kesterwood where it bends towards Tazewell Pike. The lovely manse was named Bedford Oaks when it was completed in 1928.
If you were to look out the front dormer windows on the second floor towards Greenwood Cemetery, you would have a direct line of sight to a 45-foot marble obelisk that marks the grave of young Robert Neil Kesterson. At the time it was placed, in 1928, it was the second tallest in the country, bested only by the 65-foot marker at the grave of John D. Rockefeller.
Robert was just shy of his third birthday when he died in August of 1890 from one of the plethora of largely uncurable nor preventable childhood diseases available at that time. He was originally laid to rest in Old Gray Cemetery…