Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I more or less composed this one in my head while I was watching my son at soccer practice. I can multi-task. The thing is, soccer practice is held on the soccer field area along the river, in Woodward Township, and it makes sense that I’d be thinking of local history there, because that was the rough location of the Bartholomew Family Cemetery. (It may be that I’m the only parent there who went through this particular mental process.)

Everyone knows that I’m interested in old cemeteries, unsolved mysteries, and historic areas. The Bartholomew Family Cemetery checks off all these boxes. The story goes back over two hundred years.

Johann Wendel Bartholomae was born in 1734. He and his family came from Germany and settled in Woodward Township in 1803, thirty years before Lock Haven was founded. At the time, the area was part of Lycoming County. They built a house and a barn, and established a farm. The family name became Americanized to Bartholomew.

Johann died five years later, in 1808. He was buried in a field on the property. This actually makes the Bartholomew Family Cemetery more of a graveyard—People don’t know this, but there’s a difference. Generally, a cemetery was planned and laid out for the purpose, but a graveyard is just where they started putting people when someone died.

Bartholomew’s son and wife were also buried there, as well as a couple of grandchildren. All totaled, there appear to be eight known occupants of the cemetery. Johann Bartholomew was the earliest; an in-law, Elizabeth Smith, was the latest in 1861.

So now you’re wondering if the soccer team is trying to score between two gravestones, maybe dodging in and out between the markers. Nope, don’t worry about that. They’re not playing so much in the cemetery as over it.
After the death of Adam, the son, ownership of the property left the family. (I’m taking the genealogical society’s word on this; it was 1833, which predates the available county records.) The barn was torn down in 1935 by owner Ed Swope.

The cemetery wasn’t preserved. Today, it would certainly be, but back then this sort of thing happened all the time. The stones were removed, and one source says they were used to line a swampy area near the canal. If you’re the sort of person who enjoys my column, I’m sure you’re shocked by that, but back then people took a more coldly practical approach to this sort of thing. The county is filled with cemeteries that were destroyed or not cared for.

So if you’re looking for the Bartholomew Family Cemetery, you’re not going to spot it during a soccer game. But you can find one small piece of it not too far away.

In Section One of the Dunnstown Cemetery, there’s a marker for Adam Bartholomew, who died at age thirty-one in 1821. For some reason, his stone alone was saved and moved to Dunnstown Cemetery, where it still stands. Just the stone, you understand—Adam himself is still buried somewhere out where the family farm used to be. There’s not much documentation and no real explanation why anyone would do this, but Adam’s gravestone remains, the only tangible bit of the Bartholomew Cemetery left over.

Nobody knows exactly where the cemetery stood, but it’s someplace in the vicinity. You never know, it could be right under the soccer fields as the kids play. A lot of history is like that—Hidden just below the surface, only available after a little digging. Metaphorical digging, to be clear. I’m not interrupting soccer practice.