Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I like cemeteries. I can’t help it. There’s just something amazing about the old cemeteries and the stories within them. Each one is a near-infinite collection of old tales, and I long ago decided that I was eventually going to visit every cemetery in Clinton County.

There are over seventy of them, and I’ve been to about half, by my estimation. It’s a start. A couple of years ago, I visited one I hadn’t seen before: The Old North Bend Cemetery, also known as Youngwomanstown Cemetery.

It was during COVID, back when things were very bad. You remember what it was like back then: Staying home, staying away from people, finding things to do that would keep you more or less out of huge crowds. So my family took to going on drives to remote places, and that’s how I came to visit the Youngwomanstown Cemetery.

From 120, if you turn left at Summerson’s Motel and go toward the river, you’ll get there. It’s a small, open cemetery, lying within sight of the Susquehanna. Not too hard to find; I’ve tracked down far worse. According to the Clinton County Genealogical Society records, it was created sometime in the early 1800s. It may be the oldest cemetery in Chapman Township.

Youngwomanstown was founded around that time. You’d know Youngwomanstown by its current name, North Bend. In 1827, they built a church and a school. Now, in any settlement, eventually people are going to die. There’s no avoiding it. So in connection with the church, which no longer stands, they built a cemetery, too.

The earliest burial seems to be Sidney Welsh, who died in 1830 at age twenty-four. Based on the indexes, that’s the earliest one I can find. There are a couple of stones where the year is unreadable, but that’s the earliest documentable one.

In October of 1900, the North Bend Cemetery was established. (I once referred to the North Bend Cemetery as “in your face as you’re on 120,” and got hate mail for getting my directions wrong.) At that time, some of the graves were moved to the newer cemetery, which was not entirely unusual. I’ve learned that dead people spend a shocking amount of time moving around here in Clinton County.

Some of the people seem to have been moved along with the stone, and some seem to have had only the bodies moved. Lucy Ann Quigley, for instance, who died in 1835, has a stone in both cemeteries. She is documented as being in the North Bend Cemetery, so it appears that they left her stone and gave her a new one over there. Her relatives Sarah and Michael appear to be in essentially the same situation.

There are at least eleven people who are documented as being in the cemetery, but without markers. As always happens in these situations, it’s hard to tell if they ever had markers, or if maybe they were buried with one, and it was later damaged or went missing. It’s happened before; this is not my first rodeo.

John and Mary Baird are recorded as being buried in the Youngwomanstown Cemetery, but there are no stones. They died in the 1850s. Josephine Quigley was recorded as having a stone there in 1939, but it no longer exists, and she appears to have been moved to North Bend. Several others are mentioned only by initials, and it’s difficult to figure out exactly who they were.

So, another cemetery checked off my visitation list. If I keep this up, sooner or later I’ll have written about all of them, too.