Saturday, April 24, 1999
Cemetery ties Lebanon to pioneer times
Old stones tell settlement tales
BY RANDY McNUTT
The Cincinnati Enquirer
LEBANON — In the gray morning rain, Lebanon's Pioneer Cemetery looks like something from a Charles Dickens novel.
Stark, Victorian and final.
On a small hill, hand-carved stone markers cover a city block, along Main Street (Ohio 63) on Lebanon's west side, next to a car dealership.
Despite its busy location, the Pioneer Cemetery is here to stay. It is one of Southwest Ohio's oldest pioneer burial sites and a place recognized by the city for its importance to local history.
Dixon Maple, of the Warren County Historical Society Museum in Lebanon, said many people drive past the cemetery every day and don't know it exists.
Others inquire about it at the museum each month.
“They want to know where it is and how to find an ancestor who's buried there,” Mr. Maple said. “People are interested in the history.
“Did you know that Henry Clay's daughter was buried there for a while? He was on his way to Washington, D.C., with his family when they stopped for the night at the Golden Lamb, when it was a stagecoach stop in the early 1800s. His daughter got sick and died. The mother stayed on in Lebanon while Mr. Clay left for Washington. At the time, you just couldn't ship bodies around, so they buried their daughter in the cemetery. She was later exhumed.”
Randy Duff, Lebanon's superintendent of parks and cemeteries, said burials began in the cemetery in the late 1790s and ended in the 1850s.
He said the Harmon Civic Trust mowed and maintained the property until last October, when the city took it over.
“There are people who come to town just to go through that cemetery and search for their relatives,” Mr. Duff said.
When Lebanon was laid out in 1802, residents needed a final resting site. Several churches responded. The property became the Pioneer Cemetery.
Distinguished locals buried there include:
• Joshua Collett: Born in Virginia in 1781, he came to Ohio in 1801 and lived in Lebanon until his death in 1855 at age 73 years and 6 months. His epitaph: “Fifteen years a Lawyer, 18 years a Judge of the Common Pleas and Supreme Courts of the State, as a man and a Christian, he maintained a character for Piety, Simplicity, Righteousness and Love of Truth, such as only the Fear of God and Faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ can impart.”
• Ichabod Corwin. His stone reads: “The deceased was the first settler on the place where Lebanon now stands — March, 1796.” It sits next the grave of Sarah Corwin, who died in 1833 at age 81. Her stone reads: “Consort of Ichabod Corwin.” Corwin, a New Jersey native, cleared 12 acres, built a log cabin (on the site of the present Berry Middle School) and started farming. He built the original Golden Lamb Inn building and the Black Horse Tavern. He died in 1831 at age 67.
Then there are John Lincoln, who died in 1836 at age 79, and Mary Lincoln, who died in 1832 at age 72.
In her 1989 book Warren County Revisited, local historian Elva R. Adams wrote that the Lincolns came to Red Lion, north of Lebanon, in 1815 from Rockingham County, Va.
John Lincoln was a brother of Abraham Lincoln, the president's grandfather, she wrote.
Confirming that today would take some time, Mr. Maple said.
“There are six Johns and four Abraham Lincolns in our records,” Mr. Maple said. “Stuff gets complicated very quickly. We've got a whole Lincoln box. Understand that this cemetery goes back to practically the time when there was the earliest settlement.”
The Pioneer Cemetery is so old that in Lebanon it was considered historic even at the end of the 19th century. “Many graves are marked by rough stones, without any inscription,” a writer observed in the History of Warren County in the 1880s.
Today, at the dawn of a new millennium, the Pioneer Cemetery remains a block of antiquity in an old stagecoach town.
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