The Old Lima Cemetery was the second oldest graveyard in the city. It replaced the original Tanner Street Cemetery and, by 1863, many of Lima’s citizenry favored it over the older location. It sat on East Wayne Street south of the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago (later Pennsylvania) Railroad. It’s shown here long after the last burial in 1893 when it was neglected and overgrown with weeds. The last gravesites were moved to Woodlawn Cemetery in the late 1960s.
William French was born in 1782, served with the Ohio Militia in the War of 1812, settled in Allen County in 1834, made one of the first wills in the county in 1835, died in 1836, and was buried in Lima’s Tanner Street Cemetery.
Tanner Street Cemetery as well as Tanner Street, which is now Central Avenue, are no more. The mortal remains of William French, meanwhile, have been on a Lima cemetery tour. In 1856, his body was moved from the Tanner Street Cemetery to what was known as the Old Lima Cemetery only to be dug up again in 1968 and reburied in Woodlawn Cemetery, where he has rested in peace for the past 55 years.
Adjoining Woodlawn Cemetery to the west is Gethsemane Cemetery, which replaced an earlier burial ground on East Murphy Street called the Catholic Cemetery or St. Rose Cemetery after the city’s first Catholic parish.
French’s first resting place, Lima’s first cemetery, sat on the southeast corner of what today is North Central Avenue and East North Street, which at the time ended at the cemetery. Officially, the Lima News wrote in December 2003, it was known as The Old Graveyard, though locals called it the Tanner Street Cemetery.
“Although a date is not known when the cemetery began, it served Lima until the 1850s,” the News noted. “Until 1848, area folks just buried their family there whenever they needed. But in February of 1848, the Lima Cemetery Association was formed. And that year, the newspaper put out the request for citizens to meet on a February evening at the courthouse to discuss cemetery issues.”
Among those issues was space. “Country people” were asked to take their dearly departed elsewhere as The Old Graveyard was “filling up too quickly with city folk,” according to accounts at the time. “And besides, removal to a quieter spot is a distinct possibility in lieu of the march of progress.”
By the mid-1850s, bodies, including French’s, were being moved to that quieter spot about four blocks to the northeast by the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago railroad. This became known as The Old Lima Cemetery or the Wayne Street Cemetery. The cemetery could be reached by Cemetery Street, a north-south street that connected to East Market Street.
Apparently, not all the remains from the Tanner Street Cemetery made it to the new cemetery. As the years went by, the fact that the land had at one time been a cemetery got lost in the march of progress, although reminders of that fact began popping up as progress marched through the site in the early 20th century.
“The land abandoned for cemetery purposes … when the Lake Erie and Western Railroad was extended to Lima, is still the resting place of many of the early settlers of Allen County, as was evidenced this week when the remains of wooden coffins and the human bones were unearthed by the foundation diggers,” the Lima Republican-Gazette wrote November 12, 1919. “Names of the pioneers whose bodies were left in the original cemetery when it was abandoned have been forgotten, it was stated yesterday. The old cemetery records are not now available,” the newspaper added.
Meanwhile, the area around Lima’s new cemetery, which was adjacent to Benjamin Faurot’s paper mill, was also active. In May 1885, oil was discovered there and, later that year, a spirit was spotted.
On October 3, 1885, the Lima Democratic Times reported that, for about six months, “several of the night men at the paper mill have told wonderful stories concerning the mysterious appearance of a form, resembling that of a man, at different times at night.” In one encounter, the newspaper wrote, the apparition, “slowly and noiseless as a summer cloud,” appeared before “making a straight shot” for the cemetery. Despite nocturnal efforts by “several of our prominent young men” to “catch a glance at the ghost,” the apparition failed to appear.
Between 1873, when the Woodlawn Cemetery Association was formed, and October 1893, when the last burial reportedly occurred, many residents turned to the Old Lima Cemetery to bury their dead. It was reported that almost 700 people were buried there. “But as more and more people began opting to bury their dead in other existing cemeteries, the Old Lima Cemetery began to deteriorate,” the News wrote in 2003.
“After the establishment of new cemeteries many bodies were removed from this old cemetery,” J.D. Armstong said in a 1941 speech. Added Armstrong, who led an effort to clean up the cemetery, “Then the neglect really began.” Vandals turned over and defaced tombstones and weeds overran the site.
One of the new cemeteries residents turned to was Woodlawn. The Woodlawn cemetery was the result of the formation in June of 1873 of the Woodlawn Cemetery Association, which purchased 43 acres of “an unbroken tract of hills and vales, covered for the most part with magnificent forest trees” one mile southwest of Lima’s Public Square, the News wrote.
By the 1890s, Lima’s Catholic community began moving its dead from the old Catholic cemetery on East Murphy Street to Gethsemane cemetery, which adjoins Woodlawn to the west.
The old Catholic cemetery became the haunt of baseball players and fans, first as Murphy Street commons and then, in 1914, as the Murphy Street ballpark. The park eventually became Halloran Park. It was home to Lima’s minor league baseball teams and hosted barnstorming Major leaguers like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. In 1949, a fire destroyed the grandstands, and the ballpark was razed. Today Lane’s Moving and Storage occupies the site.
The Old Lima Cemetery, meanwhile, was unused for decades.
In a speech delivered as part of Lima’s Independence Day celebrations in 1907, Mayor Theodore Robb suggested turning the grounds into a park, citing its “five acres of ground, covered with magnificent shade trees, enclosed by iron fence, and traversed by gravel walks.” Noting the cemetery had not been used in years, he added, “Many bodies are there whose relatives are scattered to other states and many wholly unknown; as the years pass the interest of distant relatives grow feebler, and the care of that cemetery will necessarily grow more lax…”
It did and the cemetery became the target of occasional cleanup efforts and newspaper editorials decrying its sorry state. As the final resting place of many veterans of the country’s early wars, like French, it was also mentioned as the site of a memorial to veterans and served as the destination for Memorial Day parades as late as 1968.
In October 1968, some 75 years after the last person was buried there and despite efforts by the Lima Veterans Council to stop it, Common Pleas Court gave permission to the Woodlawn Cemetery Association to move gravesites from the Old Lima Cemetery to Woodlawn Cemetery and sell the site to Neon Products Inc.
.
.
.
SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
LEARN MORE
See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
