Brad's History and Genealogy Site

When this project started last year it was stated that the cemetery would not be moved from its location, but that it would only be shifted over on the same property the few feet necessary to widen highway 135. Although the new location isn't that far away, they have still moved another cemetery and this time they did it without telling anyone.

Brad
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Center Grove area pioneers reburied

BY JOSEPH S. PETE
Johnson County Daily Journal Staff writer

Nov. 24, 2009

More than 80 Johnson County residents who died in the 19th century recently took a short trip up State Road 135 before they were laid to rest a second and final time.

Graves in the Mount Auburn Cemetery were exhumed and moved to make way for a widened stretch of State Road 135. G.H. Herrmann Funeral Homes relocated the remains to The Gardens at Olive Branch, where the company re-created the pioneer-era cemetery with the original headstones and wrought-iron fence.

Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne archaeologists drafted a map of where the settlers had been buried that allowed G.H. Herrmann to arrange them the same way, company owner Jeff Herrmann said. All the remains, which included entire skeletons in some cases, were placed in new caskets since the wooden coffins had long since rotted away.

Each person got an individual marker, although most of the dead could not be identified. Most of the headstones could not be linked to particular people, so they were spaced out between the graves.

The relocated cemetery is set off by the original 19th-century fence, which still has a working gate latch.

Herrmann donated a granite obelisk for the relocated settlement-era cemetery at The Gardens at Olive Branch, which he thought would be fitting because of the scale of a few of the monuments.

The Indiana Department of Transportation paid to relocate the cemetery, but a cost estimate was not available.

"It's the newest oldest cemetery in Johnson County," Herrmann said. "The Mount Auburn Cemetery goes back to some of the first settlers of the area. They have the final resting place they deserve now that the move is complete."

The first known burial at Mount Auburn Cemetery took place in 1833, which makes it one of the first cemeteries in the Center Grove area, county historian Max Fitzpatrick said. The church cemetery, however, was not the first in Johnson County, since the first settlers came to Edinburgh in 1818.

The last burial at Mount Auburn was believed to be in 1883.

Road projects rarely result in cemetery relocations, INDOT spokeswoman Annette Cousert said. The state had no choice in this case because the proximity of a creek meant that they couldn't reroute the highway.

More than a dozen G.H. Herrmann funeral directors worked for more than six months to dig up the remains, some of which were buried 9 feet deep. They dug by hand, snapping several shovels and using hand trowels when they came upon the mostly maple coffins that rotted away long ago.

They had no way of knowing how deep the graves were buried because the church's records were lost in a tornado. They couldn't stick rods into the ground to gauge how far down they were buried, as they normally would, because little was left of the wooden coffins, Cousert said.

As a result, the relocation was done almost entirely by hand, without any heavy excavating equipment, Herrmann said. He wanted to be careful not to damage any of the remains, to be sensitive to the dignity of those who were buried there and to be observant of the way they had been buried in the 19th century.

"We wanted to treat them the way they had been treated in their time," he said. "They did things very differently during that time period."

The directors had to dig until they found orange streaks from metal coffin hinges or nails. They then carefully sorted for any and all remains, including buttons and scraps of clothing.

"We dug down 4 or 5 feet and found nothing in some cases but went another foot just to be sure," Herrmann said. "We wanted to be sure that we missed nothing."

Only three of the 84 people were found buried under their headstones.

John and Eve Surface were buried under the most elaborate monument, and John Surface was found in a wrought-iron casket similar to what Abraham Lincoln was laid to rest in, Herrmann said.

"We don't know much about them, but we do know they had to have been extremely affluent," he said. "Most people of that time period could not have afforded a casket like that."

Boulders rested on top of the Surfaces' caskets, which is extremely rare for settlement-era cemeteries in Indiana, IPFW archaeologist Craig Arnold said. The community likely was concerned that someone might have been interested in ransacking the graves.

The university archeologists studied the cemetery, even sending some of the remains to forensics specialists temporarily, and may use some of the data they gathered in future academic research, Arnold said. The data won't be revealing until they get a chance to compare what they found at Mount Auburn with other cemeteries from a similar time period.

About a third of the graves belonged to infants or small children. During the settlement era, children were susceptible to succumbing to a number of illnesses until they hit late adolescence, Arnold said.

Mount Auburn United Methodist Church plans to dedicate the relocated cemetery in the spring.
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This article is from August 2008 and shows their intention not to move the cemetery.

Workers moving graves

BY DAILY JOURNAL

August 21, 2008

Workers dug up about six 19th-century graves in a small church-owned cemetery adjacent to Dye's Walk Country Club in the Center Grove area Wednesday.

The graves dating back to 1875 will be relocated to make room for an expanded State Road 135, an Indiana Department of Transportation official said. The state plans to widen the road to five lanes.

The road project requires the remains and headstones to be moved, spokesman Marvin Jenkins said. Once exhumed, the remains will be repositioned within the small family cemetery, which is surrounded by country club property adjacent to the highway and near the clubhouse.

Relocating the remains was unavoidable, he said.

Jenkins said the state attempted to notify any known descendants of those buried there, but Willard Surface, one of the descendants, said he never received word that work was starting.

Surface, who is related to five people buried there, said he was upset that he didn't get notice so he could be there during the excavation.

Indiana University-Purdue University-Fort Wayne archaeologist Bob McCullough was present Wednesday to oversee the work.

Headstones will be provided at the state's expense for any remains relocated from unmarked graves, Jenkins said.

The cemetery owned by Mount Auburn United Methodist Church also is known as the Pleasant Hill Society or Surface Cemetery, said Linda Talley, genealogy librarian at the Johnson County Museum of History.

The process of excavation and re-interment is expected to take a few weeks, Jenkins said.