Lou’s View: DEAD AHEAD
Let’s go explore a cemetery.
I love old cemeteries. The big, elaborate ones are great. Even better are the old, abandoned cemeteries, the ancient ones that aren’t so easy to get to. There’s something about them that fascinates me.
Clinton County has both kinds. I love walking among the stones at Highland Cemetery, in Lock Haven. And when it comes to ancient, abandoned graveyards, it’s hard to beat Stech-Simcox Cemetery in Wayne Township.
Want to explore it with me? Get to Wayne Township. (That’s McElhattan area, for those of you who are fuzzy on where the townships exist.) Drive out Pine Mountain Road, and turn left onto Spook Hollow Road. Follow it down near the river, where the bike trail begins these days. At this point, you’ll have to get out and walk the path. On your right you’ll see a field—Pass it and go under the 220 overpass. Turn left and walk along the edge of the second field. (At this point, by the way, you’re officially trespassing. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.) If you stick to the edge long enough, you’ll hit the Stech-Simcox Cemetery, a tiny place that has been around for centuries, and hasn’t been maintained in decades.
If all that sounds like too much work—Oh, and if you’re not willing to brave the possible thorns, snakes, and trespassing violations—You can actually see the place from the air on Google Maps. If you zoom in on the aerial view, there’s a small bump in the forest along the southern edge of that field. That’s the cemetery, seen from the air.
Stech-Simcox Cemetery has been around since about 1815. The area was once the property of Adam Stech, an early settler and farmer in Wayne Township. Often, in those days, when someone died, the property owner would simply designate some out-of-the-way spot as the graveyard, and bury the family member there. In this case, it seems to have been Adam’s son John Stech, who died and was buried there in 1815.
Adam Stech himself died in March of 1842, and was buried there, but he wasn’t the last. There seem to be about a dozen graves there, plus an arrangement of footstones. Some of them are barely visible, almost covered, and some are broken and leaning against trees. The most recent one appears to be Francis Stech, from September of 1882.
The property stayed in the family for quite a while after Adam’s death—The 1862 map of Clinton County shows a “J. Stech” in the area, on the northernmost tip of Wayne Township. This would likely be one of Adam’s sons, Jacob.
There is even a considerable prehistory to this area, if you know where to look. J.F. Meginness’s book “Otzinachson” describes a Native American artifact dug up near the cemetery, what he calls a “Remarkable curiosity.” It was a female effigy carved out of stone, about six inches tall. The folklorist Henry Wharton Shoemaker later mentioned this when he wrote down the legend “Rock of Ages” in his book “The Indian Steps.”
The writer Jacob Huff, known as Faraway Moses, visited Stech-Simcox Cemetery in the early 1800s, and was impressed by it. He wrote,”We ran across a private burial ground we had known nothing about….The private burial place is overgrown with briars and trees.”
That description is still true today. The Stech sons never married, and the Stech line died out. Today the property is owned by an agricultural company. But the cemetery remains, a fascinating little bit of the county’s history, a little piece of adventure waiting in an unlikely spot.
