Cemeteries share tales of Lafayette's rich history

With dappled sunshine dancing across his hunched back, Mark Griffith, at first glance, appears to be grieving as he sits on the sculpted cement chair from another century in Lafayette's historic Greenbush Cemetery.

But the medical director of St. Elizabeth's Wound Care Center jokes: "I'm hiding out from my nurses." Actually he motors to the quiet, beautiful cemetery, where one is never truly alone, three to four lunch hours a week to escape the hectic nature of his days.

Sometimes he just unwinds. Sometimes the history buff reads books, such as the four-inch thick tome that recounts the history of Indiana's 79th Infantry in the Civil War. Some of its dead are buried on the Greenbush grounds.

"Captain Rice is over there," he says, nodding towards a large monument over his left shoulder. "He was an attorney in Attica when the Civil War started."

Stories behind the tombstones fascinate him. One Greenbush marker for a Stephen Douglas, born in 1860, particularly tickles him. "You know his parents didn't vote for Lincoln if they named their son after Stephen Douglas in 1860, the year they ran against each other for president."

Thousands of people cruise by the Greenbush Cemetery daily, not realizing the historic riches that lie within its graceful wrought iron fence. Even more race by Spring Vale Cemetery on Indiana 25. John Purdue helped establish that cemetery, and early Lafayette movers and shakers are buried there, including several U.S. Congressmen.

Arett Campbell Arnett, medical pioneer and founder of the Arnett Clinic, the largest (in 1968) multi-specialty physician practice organization in Indiana, is buried there as is Ray C. "Deac" Ewry, a Lafayette native and Purdue University graduate who had polio as a kid but went on to win eight Olympic Gold Medals in high jump, broad jump and triple jump competition in the 1900, 1904 and 1908 Olympics.

Cemeteries are not just where the dead reside, nor are they static snapshots of the past. Cemeteries, like the 135 in Tippecanoe County alone, are dynamic places, reflecting changing social values and practices as well as regional ethnic identities.

Few know that once upon a time, Tippecanoe County had ethnic pockets of Swedes and Germans, says L.A. Clugh, genealogist with the Tippecanoe County Historical Association. But the Yorktown Cemetery in Tippecanoe Township is an old Swedish burial ground, and there are German burials in Ulrey Cemetery in Perry Township.

Records show that Canal Cemetery in Union Township was a mass burial ground for Irish workers on the Wabash and Erie Canal who died of malaria in 1847.

Helms Cemetery in Wayne Township is believed to be the site where a wagon train of pioneers was buried in 1839 following a cholera epidemic.

After the Washington Monument was completed in 1884, miniature copies of it started popping up as monuments in graveyards such as Spring Vale. There are five markers that look like felled trees (a fad of the 1890s) in Greenbush.

Even though the Civil War was not fought in Indiana, there are 38 Confederate prisoners of war buried at Greenbush alongside 22 Union soldiers killed in a train wreck. Once the occupants of the Confederate graves were considered unknown, but research by Clugh and others has given each an identity.

Clugh, whose name is pronounced "clue," works passionately statewide, and particularly in Tippecanoe County, to provide clues to those seeking to trace their roots through the Tippecanoe County Historical Library and Archives.

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There is now a "Find-a-Grave" service online that lists all of the tombstones identified in the county's 135 cemeteries as well as others around the state. Clugh has photographed every cemetery that's still viable and guides visitors through the archives at South and Valley Drive where dozens of file cabinets overflow with old records — from marriage licenses and wills to old cemetery plat maps. Currently, volunteers are poking through 100 boxes, found in the basement of the Tippecanoe County Courthouse, looking for old handwritten receipts for pauper graves in 1865 and 1866 so they can add them to "Find-A-Grave."

"At that time there were a lot of migrating people with no families here. If they died along the way there was no one to bury them, so the county paid for it," Clugh says.

The respect for each individual life becomes evident as you talk to anyone whose life has been touched by old historic cemeteries. Fairfield Township Trustee Julie Roush never thought she'd be in the graveyard business until the association behind the Greenbush Cemetery dissolved and she became its guardian.

"History was not my favorite subject in school," she admits. "But now I think history is absolutely cool. I didn't care until I got involved in this (Greenbush Cemetery care). To me there's living history in those stones — Victorian stones with epitaphs, stones for babies, stones for singles. There are stories behind all of them, stories about the Civil War. It grabbed me."

In Wea Township, Trustee Matt Koehler helped resurrect two old rural cemeteries that were basically destroyed. "There's a reverence (in the old cemeteries) for the people who came before us and did hard work to establish this county. It's incumbent on civilized society to maintain them. If we lose sight of the maintenance of those sort of things, we lose sight of the big picture of society," he says.

The Freer-Black Cemetery on County Road 430 South required three years of hard work by neighbors to restore, Koehler says. Only one obelisk was left when the restoration began. By running special probes that make a noise when a buried tombstone is detected "we found twice as many stones as records indicated. Some headstones had traveled 40 or 50 feet from the cemetery area," Koehler says.

Researched and grouped into families, the stones were painstakingly cleaned, repaired and reset around the obelisk. Then a fence was built around the restored graveyard to restore its dignity.

Old names for some of the county's rural cemeteries — Hog Point, Hollywood, Pop's Center, Comet Fry and Old Radical — bring smiles. But Clugh doesn't laugh. Conditions of those cemeteries rank from "not great" to destroyed.

In 2000 Indiana passed laws that protect small cemeteries that hold so much of our history. It is illegal to destroy a cemetery or dispose of tombstones. It only takes one grave to constitute an official cemetery. But in reality no cemetery is safe.

"It only takes a couple years for a cemetery to go downhill," Clugh says, and some have been neglected for decades. Greenbush Cemetery, where Lafayette's founder William Digby lies, should be the pride of the city as its oldest standing cemetery. But it's not.

"Groundhogs do an amazing amount of damage. I stepped in a hole up to my knee at Greenbush. And the trees have been neglected for 50 years. (After) every storm, limbs come down," Clugh says.

One unremarkable June day while Griffith was spending his lunch hour in the cemetery, he heard creaking and looked up to see a huge limb (the size of a 50-year-old tree), rip from its parent and crash to the ground.

Roush, who has no budget for Greenbush maintenance, has been actively seeking grants and donations, and she has been pleased to see as many as 100 concerned citizens volunteer on cleanup days at the old cemetery.

Old newspaper descriptions of Greenbush extol its park-like setting, and the potential is still there. Roush is ready to fight for its return. "If we don't fight for anything, we don't stand for anything. This was the first cemetery in our community that was park-like, and I would truly love to return it to the garden look with benches and flowers."

Fall 2014 marks the 150th anniversary of the train wreck that killed the Union Civil War soldiers buried at Greenbush, and a Blue and Gray Ball will be held on Nov. 8 at the Lafayette Country Club to benefit the cemetery and bring attention to its plight. "I want to do something in costume in the cemetery on Veteran's Day, Nov. 11," she adds.

Greenbush may be the city's oldest cemetery, but it was not its first. The very first burial ground was at the site of the current St. Boniface Catholic Church at North and Ninth streets. Early citizens were interred at the site of an old Indian burial ground there. Lafayette City Graveyard, now known as Greenbush Cemetery, began in 1843. When the church was built in 1865 all of the tombstones and graves were moved to the area nearest the intersection of Ninth and Greenbush streets.

With Greenbush filling up, there was a desperate need for a new city cemetery. "Cemeteries are a business venture and someone has to step forward," Clugh says. John Purdue stepped forward to help establish another park-like cemetery, Spring Vale, on Indiana 25, even though he would eventually be buried on Purdue's Memorial Mall.

Spring Vale, which opened in 1869, still has plots available. Following a current trend, it also boasts a special site for green burials. Among the movers and shakers buried there is Moses Fowler, who came to Lafayette with John Purdue and became a leading businessman, banker and a land baron in Benton County. Special tracks had to be laid in Spring Vale to deliver his monument, Clugh says, because it was so huge.

It was at Spring Vale that Lafayette's George Frantz literally tripped over his own history. "L.A. Clugh wanted to show me some of the more unique markers and we were in the far south end of the cemetery when I tripped over a stone," he recalls.

"I knew my family had first settled in Clinton County but from there I lost track of them. The stone I tripped over was my great-great-great grandfather. I discovered there were a whole bunch of relatives buried in that area who came to Lafayette in the 1880s." Like Frantz, many people visit the TCHA archives and area cemeteries to finish the puzzle of their family ancestry.

Frantz, president of the William Henry Harrison chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, spends time in many local cemeteries. So far the SAR has identified 20 patriots associated with the American Revolution buried in Tippecanoe County and has held 20 separate ceremonies in 14 different cemeteries to honor them. The chapter researches each individual, so personalized comments can be made at the ceremonies and descendants can be invited.

Identifying Revolutionary War soldiers is a challenge for the SAR. "You have to remember those we are honoring all died prior to 1852, just after Indiana became a state and Tippecanoe became a county," he says. One of them is his 5th great-grandfather, Mathias Parson, who spent the winter at Valley Forge with George Washington. He is buried at Stockwell Cemetery.

"Standing at the gravestone of someone who fought in the country's first war, it really affects me," Frantz says.

Visiting old historic cemeteries brings rewards, even if you're not searching for a bit of family history. The symbols, the unusual markers, the atmosphere and the bits of local history intrigue. Storyteller, historical researcher and author Laura Clavio says "graves give us a lot of folklore and stories. In one of the ghost tales I wrote, I elaborated on a grave in Terre Haute where a stuffed dog was put into the mausoleum of its owner and the teenagers who would go to see the stuffed dog at night. Tales people tell about graveyards add lore to the community," she says.

That type of "lore' isn't too hard to find. It is recorded that Hugh DeWitt, who died at age 80 in 1900, dug his own grave in the Battle Ground Cemetery and had his coffin made from a walnut tree in his yard. The inscription on his monument read:

"here beneath the sod lies a bachelor who disobeyed the law of GOD; advice to others thus i give, do not live a batch as i did live; regrets."

Clavio says an element commonly called "peace" is available at every cemetery and makes it worth the trip. "The big trees add a sense of caring and peace. I think we all get solace out of visiting places like that where there is a sense of nature."

Some of Clugh's favorite rural cemeteries include Horney Cemetery (a.k.a. Beeville Cemetery) in Lauramie Township. "It's straight up a long dirt road. It doesn't seem like Tippecanoe County, more like southern Indiana. Just a little cemetery with an iron fence."

When black-eyed susans are blooming, she finds the tiny one-grave Skinner Cemetery in Lauramie Township charming. The flowers surround a tiny tombstone marking the unnamed infant of John and Nancy Skinner, believed to date to the 1880s.

One of the big cemetery mysteries in the county will probably never see resolution. Folks who died at the County Poor Farm were buried, often in unmarked graves, in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Tippecanoe Township. No written records have been uncovered, and the dirt excavated from the construction of I-65 was dumped on top of that area.

Those curious to see a complete list of Tippecanoe County cemeteries, their locations, historical ties, physical condition and accessibility can find it online by searching Tippecanoe County Indiana cemeteries. There are pictures of many.

Koehler says, "Most people aren't aware how many cemeteries there are. As you drive around, there are lots you don't see because they are located outside of view from the road."

The people buried in them all played a role, large or small, in the county's history. "They are where we came from almost 200 years ago. If you don't know where you've been, you don't know where you are going to go," Koehler says. "It's nice to re-fence a cemetery, to make history visible. We didn't just show up here in a vacuum."

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