Iowa's best known cemetery angels are located at opposite ends of the state. One, in Iowa City's Oakland Cemetery, marks the final resting place of Nicholas and Teresa Feldevert and her son by an earlier marriage, Edward Dolezal. The other, in Fairview Cemetery, Council Bluffs, memorializes but does not mark the grave of Ruth Anne Dodge. Both are quite large and referred to as "black angels" because time and the elements have oxidized their surfaces.
The best of the angels scattered around the Chariton Cemetery is located at the grave of Bonnie Johnson, who was 8 when she died of diphtheria in Des Moines on March 7, 1919, and is much smaller --- and friendlier. Bonnie's parents, Harry and Olive (McEndree) Johnson, brought their daughter home to Chariton for burial beside her grandfather, Frank O. McEndree, who had died several years earlier.
"Angel" derives from "angelus," Greek/Latin for "messenger," intermediaries between human and the divine. On the one hand, there are angels of death, sent to convey the souls of the deceased. On the other, there are guardian angels.
Bonnie's angel seems to fall into the latter category and still, 101 years later, guards her charge as she sleeps here not far inside the cemetery's main entrance gate.
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