The old general died in early May 1858. “Death found him in vigorous old age,” Lima’s Western Gazette wrote, “like an ancient oak still green.”
William Blackburn was buried “with martial rites” on May 8, 1858, “followed to the tomb by an immense concourse of citizens – many a bosom swelled with emotion, as they followed the hearse that bore him to the grave; and many a tear bedewed the clods that fell over his coffin; all felt that a valuable citizen, a warm and generous friend, had been gathered to the final resting place of all mortals.”
Blackburn was an outsized figure, both physically — county histories pegged him at more than 6 feet tall and weighing about 300 pounds — and in the role he played in early Allen County, where he served as a land agent, legislator and militia leader. A hero of the War of 1812, he became a major general in the Ohio militia and gloried in drilling the local troops during musters in the Public Square in the 1840s.
In the years after Blackburn’s death, Lima grew up around the old cemetery on East Wayne Street. Trains rattled past nearby, and streetcars and automobiles jockeyed for space in the Square where Blackburn had once drilled the troops.
William Rusler, in his 1921 history of Allen County, wrote that Blackburn “was given to pomp and ceremony, and with his plume and spurs he would sit on a horse like a cavalier of old; he was as handsome a soldier as ever mounted a charger. When General Blackburn headed the procession in Lima and was followed by a military band, he was the center of attention from all.”
Seventy years after his death, in October 1928, weeds had grown up around his gravesite, and few traces of the Lima the general knew remained.
“His tombstone desecrated by vandals, the body of Major General William J. Blackburn, one of Lima’s most illustrious pioneers, lies in a sunken and all but forgotten grave in an abandoned graveyard known as the Old Cemetery at East Wayne and North Park Streets,” The Lima News wrote Oct. 7, 1928. The newspaper added that “the desolation seemed even to have spread outside the old cemetery itself. On the east an abandoned brewery and on the west a rambling, unoccupied structure once used for a paper mill.”
It was an inglorious final resting place for a man the newspaper went on to describe as “one of the most noted of the pioneers in this part of Ohio… a picturesque figure in Lima in the long ago.”
Blackburn was born in Maryland or Pennsylvania in June 1787. His father “removed to Ohio among the early pioneers of this state, and settled in Columbiana County,” the Allen County Democrat wrote in his obituary.
“In the year 1813, after (General William) Hull had surrendered the American army at Detroit (in August 1812), and our frontier was open to the tomahawk and scalping knife of the savage, the call of his country found young Blackburn ready to gird himself for the contest,” the Democrat wrote.
Blackburn promptly raised a company of volunteers in Columbiana County and began a miserable march northward to rescue the survivors of Hull’s army.
“Through the mud and rain, snows and storms of that terrible winter, he was ever at his post and ready for duty,” the Democrat added.
Blackburn arrived in Michigan in January 1813 after James Winchester had been defeated at Frenchtown (the current site of Monroe, Mich.) on the River Raisin, and Blackburn’s company of volunteers rescued some of the survivors of that defeated army. He then returned to Maumee, where his company assisted William Harrison in the construction of Fort Meigs. At the close of the War of 1812, he returned to Columbiana County and in 1817 was elected to the Ohio Legislature. He would serve five terms.
In 1835, President Andrew Jackson appointed him land agent for northwestern Ohio. The office was in Wapakoneta but was moved to Lima the following year. Blackburn was reappointed to the office in 1839 by President Martin Van Buren and served in that capacity until 1843.
“When in charge of the U.S. land office in Lima,” the News wrote in 1928, “General Blackburn had a very great responsibility in handling and accounting for large sums of gold and silver, without the convenience of a modern safe. … when a considerable amount of gold had been accumulated from the sales, General Blackburn would pack the coin in salt barrels, load them on the wagon, and make the trip to Columbus with oxen.”
When the land office was moved to Upper Sandusky in 1843, Blackburn retired to Allentown with his second wife, Rebecca Cully, whom he had married in 1828 after the death of his first wife, Janie Armstrong. In 1851, he was again elected to the Ohio Legislature.
In 1850, Blackburn, who operated a mill in Allentown, built a large log home known as the Blackburn Mansion, which, Rusler wrote in his county history, was long a social center. The home burned down in 1904. The “seasoned black walnut finish in it would command a fortune today,” Rusler noted.
According to all accounts, Blackburn was above all else a “military enthusiast” and lived for the militia musters. Militias had been established by the U.S. Congress in 1792, which required all men between 18 and 45 to report for service and be present for drilling and musters at various times throughout the year. The system was in place until after the Civil War.
“In the early history of Allen County,” Rusler noted, “muster days in Lima rivaled the Fourth of July Celebrations; since Allentown was the home of Gen. William Blackburn who was in command of the Northwestern Ohio Division and Brigadier General William Armstrong (the father of Mart Amstrong, Lima’s first Civil War casualty) of Lima was in command of the Allen County Brigade, muster day in Lima meant more than in some other Ohio counties. … General Blackburn had one horse called Tam O’Shanter … with a tremendous stride, and his horse seemed to share in all the enthusiasm of the drill.”
The horse “was a chestnut sorrel and with a rider weighing 300 pounds it was a spectacular occasion when General Blackburn came riding by,” he added, noting that, because of Blackburn’s “unusual weight,” he never marched by foot in the drills.
Blackburn’s daughter, Adeline, would later recall in a letter to a friend that her father during musters wore a three-cornered hat with a red and white plume. His coat, she wrote, “was dark blue tipped with buff and also his vest was buff, coat was buttoned up with ruffles … crimped by my mother’s dear hands, red Morocco belt, with chains at the side to hold his sword, a red silk sash, tied in loops, with heavy silk tassels at his side, dark blue pants with wide gilt stripes down the side.” The horse he rode, she noted, had to be blindfolded and held by three men until her father was in the saddle.
After his 1858 death, Blackburn was buried in the original Lima cemetery at the southeast corner of North Street and Central Avenue. Years later the cemetery was moved to East Wayne Street near the Pennsylvania railroad tracks and, in 1968, under court order, the graves were moved to Woodlawn Cemetery to make room for Neon Product Inc.
The graves of Blackburn, his wives and other family members, in the southeast part of the Woodlawn Cemetery again fell into disrepair but were restored in May 2012.
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