Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

“I have a question for you, Lou,” my friend Emily said. “There’s a cemetery near a church out by my place. It’s small. What can you tell me about it?”

It’s amazing what passes for small talk in my life.

I get this sort of thing a lot. Friends ask me about buildings and properties, strangers walk up to ask me about the same thing. It’s not hard to look up a cemetery in Clinton County, so I promised Emily I’d check into it.

Sometimes you find a prize.

That’s the case here. The one she was asking about was the Garman Lutheran Cemetery in Pine Creek Township, and it was interesting enough that I immediately took to my laptop and started writing a column about it.

The first thing I did was to check the cemetery books from the Clinton County Genealogical Society. In 2008, CCGS did a wonderful job of documenting every known grave in Clinton County, along with maps, directions, and history on each one. Because of this, they made it way easier for me to find information on any cemetery in the county.

Including the Garman Lutheran Cemetery. The name comes from Henry and Hannah Garman, who opened their home to the early congregation of their church, before anyone could build an actual structure. When the group organized in 1845, it was first the Pine Creek Union Sabbath School and Congregation, and then the Pine Creek English Lutheran Church. The Reverend Shultz preached in the Garman house once a month, and the family wound up with a church named after them over a hundred years later.

The cemetery was created when the church was built in 1846, not long after the congregation first gathered together. Now, early records are somewhat sketchy, because in the days when everyone was struggling to raise their own food and build their own homes, nobody was all that big on paperwork.

Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this into a column if this hadn’t led to some interesting situations. There was an od gravedigger named Charles Kissel, who would sometimes dig a grave and find it already occupied. This ended up creating some double burials, with a couple of bodies in one grave. (Kissel himself is not buried in the Garman Lutheran Cemetery; he died in 1957 and was buried in Jersey Shore.)

This is actually not due to any avoidance of a double burial; it happened because the Garman Lutheran Cemetery has been full for decades. The CCGS book notes that in 1888, the original church burned down, and by 1889, a new one was built, and soon after, the cemetery was filled up. “The cemetery became full long ago,” states the CCGS book.

The cemetery fell into disrepair by the 1930s, which happened a lot—During our conversation, I told Emily about the Great Island Cemetery, which was in such bad condition that the city of Lock Haven moved all the graves in 1919. At least, the ones they could find—To this day, remnants of the cemetery turn up occasionally on that site.

The Garman Lutheran Cemetery was in bad condition, but a man named Ralph Shields and his father cleaned it up and did some maintenance, and it’s cared for today.

Important people in the cemetery include Captain Michael Wolf, of the Revolutionary War. Wolf was born in 1730, and served with the Berks County Militia. He died in 1825, when Pine Creek Township was still part of Lycoming County.

The Garman Lutheran Cemetery is still around, but not accepting burials to the best of my knowledge. Still it’s a cool cemetery, and I got a good column out of this one. I can’t wait until Emily sees it.