Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

For someone who once majored in education, I spent an outrageous amount of time writing about dead people. I sort of lucked into that; I’ve always been interested in cemeteries. I enjoy exploring them, and seeing what’s there, even the little ones. I’ve always found something fascinating about them.

I’ve written about cemeteries a lot. Highland Cemetery in Lock Haven is the ultimate in that regard, but there are somewhere around seventy other cemeteries in Clinton County. The exact number varies depending on your source, but it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy. They are a variety of sizes and locations, and I’ve written about many of them.

Gallagher Township is pretty well-off, cemetery-wise. Some of the townships have no cemeteries, one or two, or perhaps a couple of random buried bodies, but Gallagher has six cemeteries and a privately buried body named Valentine Cryder that nobody can quite pinpoint. It has the Cryder Cemetery, not to be confused with the Crider Cemetery elsewhere, and I have literally received hate mail on that account. And it has a smaller, more or less abandoned one.

Lucullus Cemetery. I always knew, at some point, I’d get around to writing about Lucullus Cemetery.

Lucullus Cemetery is very near the county line, along Route 44. You can’t really see it from the road; you have to get out and walk a little bit. It’s in the woods. There are around twenty graves there, a disproportionate number of them unknown. Many of them are children, too, reflecting the high infant mortality rate back in the 1800s.

Lucullus was a lumbering community over a century ago. It wasn’t one of our bigger, better-known ones, like Glen Union or Revelton. I’ve rarely heard about Lucullus outside the context of the cemetery, actually. I looked up the word “Lucullus,” and it turns out he was some sort of Roman general who was known for his amazing banquets. So the logging town of Lucullus may have been an interesting place.

According to the Clinton County Genealogical Society records, there was a school there once—In 1907, the Barton Independent School stood there. I hope their lessons included General Lucullus.

The earliest marked grave seems to be twelve-year-old Annah G. Coon, who died on August 25, 1862. There’s a bit of verse on her grave, mostly readable: “Annah is dead, a child so sweet and fair, As opening rosebuds in the morning (faded, probably ‘air’), Round her pure brow, let darkest cypress (No idea.)”

Four-year-old George Nowell is buried there with a marker, from January 30, 1881. The marker has the “Suffer the little children” verse; I’m sure you know it. Nearby, there are two infants with the last name of Gaus, from 1871 and 1875 respectively.

The map of Lucullus Cemetery, again documented by CCGS, shows several trees surrounded by stones and flowers, a bench, the remains of a very large wooden cross, and a random rock pile that may be a cairn. (For the record, I adore the Genealogical Society. They’ve done a wonderful job of documenting all the graves and other historic information over the years.)

The most recent grave is John Giles, who was buried there in the ancient year of 1993. Giles, born in 1918, served in the Navy at the end of World War II. He lived nearby and took an interest in the Lucullus Cemetery, and spent many years taking care of it singlehandedly. When he died in 1993, it seemed reasonable for him to be buried there. Interestingly, his wife died in 2004, and if she’s buried there, it isn’t marked.

Sooner or later, I figure I’ll write about every Clinton County cemetery. After this column, I can check Lucullus off my list. Maybe I’ll have a banquet to celebrate.