Across Ohio, cemeteries have been moved, disturbed, and sometimes forgotten—yet the land does not always give up its memories so easily.

Alum Creek Reservoir and the Cheshire Cemetery

Beneath calm water, the past waited—until it was ready to return.

Delaware County, Ohio

A little over fifty years ago, the land beneath what is now Alum Creek Reservoir held farms, roads, and family burial grounds that had long been part of the Delaware County landscape. When the reservoir was planned in the early 1970s, the responsibility of preparing that land fell to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—a familiar name in stories where water reshapes both land and memory.

Among the cemeteries in the path of the rising waters was the old Cheshire Cemetery.

In 1973, approximately 1,400 graves were carefully disinterred and moved to higher ground, an effort intended to preserve what could be saved before the valley was flooded. On paper, it was a thorough and respectful process—one carried out with the understanding that nothing would be left behind.

But the land had other plans.

Years later, as water levels shifted and the shoreline changed, the past began to surface again.

In 1991, and then more notably in 2009, caskets and human remains were discovered along the eastern banks of Alum Creek Reservoir—quiet reminders that not every grave had been found, and not every story had been fully carried to its new resting place. What had once been carefully buried, and then carefully moved, returned in fragments, shaped by erosion, time, and the steady movement of water.

There were discussions of reinterring the newly discovered remains at nearby Berlin Cheshire Road Cemetery, though the full resolution of those efforts remains uncertain.

It is a story that reflects both intention and limitation—of people who tried to do right by the past, and of a landscape that does not always yield everything it holds.

And perhaps that is the lasting truth beneath Alum Creek’s calm surface:
that even when we believe the work is finished, the land remembers what we could not fully carry with us.

Source: Columbus Dispatch Newspaper, April 10, 2009

Cleveland’s First Burial Ground - Ontario Street Cemetery to Erie Street Cemetery

“They believed the past had been carried away—but some of it remained behind.”

The first burial in Cleveland took place on June 1, 1797, on a small rise of ground near what would later become the intersection of Ontario Street and Prospect Avenue.

David Eldridge, a member of an early surveying party, had drowned while attempting to swim his horse across the Grand River. Despite every effort to revive him—bleeding, warming, and hours of care along the riverbank—he could not be saved.

The following day, the settlers chose a piece of land for a burial ground. Using wooden boards, they constructed a simple coffin, carried it on a pole, and laid Eldridge to rest. Reverend Seth Parsons read from Corinthians as 32 men, 7 women, and 3 children stood witness.

It was the first formal funeral in Cleveland.

As the village grew, so did the concern that this small cemetery—once set apart—now lay too close to the center of daily life. In 1825, Leonard Case Sr. was appointed to find a new burial ground at a proper distance from the expanding town.

An 8.9-acre tract on Erie Street was selected.

The graves were moved. The headstones followed. The past, it was believed, had been carefully carried to a new resting place.

But not everyone was convinced.

In 1884, as discussions arose about further disturbances to Erie Street Cemetery, an old settler named Isham A. Morgan wrote a letter in protest. He recalled that even after the original Ontario Street Cemetery had been cleared, bones were still found when the land was later disturbed—remains whose identities were already lost.

What became of them, he wondered.

More than a century later, his question would quietly return.

In the early 2000s, during construction on the original burial site, human bones were once again uncovered—suggesting that not every grave had been found, and not every story had been fully moved.

The markers may have changed places.

But the land, it seems, kept some of its own.

Sources

• McDowell, Polly. “Cleveland’s Past Comes Alive in the Cemetery.”
  The Plain Dealer Magazine (Cleveland, Ohio), October 13, 1985, p. 12.

• Howe, Henry. Historical Collections of Ohio.
  Cuyahoga County section, p. 503.

• Parsons, Rev. Seth.
  Excerpts from letters written during the Western Reserve surveying expedition (1797).

• Morgan, Isham A. “Erie Street Cemetery: A Protest Against Its Removal by an Old Settler.”
  The Cleveland Leader (Cleveland, Ohio), October 3, 1884, p. 5

These accounts, written across more than a century, reflect both the care taken—and the questions that remained.