Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I have this map. The county government printed it out for me a few years ago. It’s a big, excellent map of the whole county, and it shows the location of all the known cemeteries. According to the map, there are seventy cemeteries within Clinton County.

When I’m researching cemeteries, I also refer to the series of ten books published by the Clinton County Genealogical Society. In 2008, CCGS did a wonderful job of cataloguing the graves; they walked through every cemetery and listed every name and date on them. As it was sixteen years ago, there have obviously been some new ones since then, but that’s okay—I only deal in old history.

The oldest cemetery in Clinton County is Dunnstown Cemetery, in Woodward Township. It was laid out in 1792, when the area was still Northumberland County. When William Dunn founded Dunnstown, he made a note that at some point, they’d need a cemetery for sure. It didn’t take long—Settler William Baird died at age seventy-nine on September 2, 1792, and was buried there, probably the oldest marked grave in the county.

The northernmost cemetery is Laurel Hill Cemetery, in Leidy Township. It’s right near the border of Potter County, and to get to it, you actually have to drive into Potter County, turn around, and come back into Clinton County, finding Laurel Hill Lane. This one began with one grave; a landowner named Frederick Stewart was buried there in 1853, and then in 1897, the rest of the land was deeded over to make a cemetery around his grave.

The southernmost cemetery seems to be the Tylersville Community Cemetery, down in Sugar Valley. This one is along Route 880, on the right if you’re going west. This one isn’t as old as a lot of the others; it dates back to 1948.

Since we already did north and south, let’s do east and west. The westernmost cemetery is Ganoe Cemetery of West Keating Township, and the easternmost one seems to be the Brethren Cemetery in Green Township.

Want to talk about the most remote cemetery? Good luck with that, because there seems to be at least a three-way tie for first place. The Dennison Family Cemetery of Keating Township, the Glen Union Cemetery and Whetham Cemetery of Grugan Township all seem to be very remote, and honestly there are certainly a bunch of other remote ones that are not occurring to me right now.

I’m not even going to get into the biggest cemetery, which would require more property research than I feel like doing right now. Smallest is probably a tie, arguably—There are several locations in the county where one child is buried, and some of them are documented but not even marked.

“Most interesting cemetery” is probably at least a twenty-way tie. But there are a lot of fascinating stories around some of these graves. Nancy Kepler has a marker outside a barn in Glen Union, and may actually be buried beneath the floor of the barn. The Trader’s Tombstone was found very near the Bald Spot on the mountain above Lock Haven, the grave of a French trader who died there during Colonial days—And it hasn’t been found in recent years. Linnwood Cemetery contains a column from the Pennsylvania Capitol Building in it as a monument.

And the coolest cemetery….Well, “coolest” is a very subjective term. But I’m writing this article, so I get to declare it. I’m going with Highland, in Lock Haven, which has a lot of famous people, most of Lock Haven’s mayors, and Henry Shoemaker buried in it. That all makes it excessively cool.

Now I feel like taking a walk through a cemetery. Anyone want to come along?