Here is the link for information about this upcoming November 19th, 2025 event at Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery.
Sharing the latest post from Eli & Amanda Allen and their "Wandering Appalachia" website.
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Enjoy moving Isaac Price's marker around!
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"From the "Mercer County Outlook"
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"Back in May, the Recorder’s Office was selected by GIS students from Miami University to collaborate on a project focused on Mercer County cemeteries. I’m excited to announce that the finished project has now been implemented on the Mercer County website!
Julie Peel
This dynamic, history-packed event will have you ready to declare independence from dull lesson plans.
Content experts will cover the American Revolution, American Indian cultures, and Ohio’s key role in the fight for independence—all while sharing engaging strategies to bring the 18th century to life in your classroom.
Rally with fellow educators and get inspired to spark a revolution in how your students experience history."
11067 Fort Laurens Rd.
Bolivar, OH 44697
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Fort Laurens Cemetery on Find a Grave
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Excerpt:
"LaRue is president of the State Board of Education of Ohio and serves as the co-chair for the America 250 Ohio K-12 Education Committee.
He taught high school history for 30 years at Washington Court House High School."
“Folks sometimes think that cemeteries are weird or creepy or scary,” he said. “But, my students really grew to love being out there because it gave them a frame of reference for things.”
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"Friends of the Cemetery is a non-profit organization committed to preserving and beautifying two of Medina’s historic cemeteries, Spring Grove Cemetery and Old Town Graveyard.
Organization President Teresa Merkle said they try to host presentations from people who focus on preservation and history.
She said the organization is involved in preserving headstones in the cemetery."
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Sharing from the Scioto Post.:
On September 4, 2025, John King, an original volunteer who has devoted countless hours working at the Old Burying Ground since 2014, has provided an updated progress report for this decade-plus long program entitled:
"Old Burying Ground Preservation Project".
This historic and scenic cemetery is located in beautiful Greenfield,
Highland County, Ohio.
This project is an all-volunteer cemetery preservation / restoration / conservation endeavor that ensures it addresses all of the needs of the cemetery, including resolving the negative issues
impacting the grave markers and monuments that grace
the sacred grounds of this early Ohio cemetery's landscape.
This all encompassing focus includes repairing
the cemetery's fencing and gates.
"Old Burying Ground Preservation Project"
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"U.S. MILITARY"
"The VA says a growing number of history buffs, Boy Scout troops and others are making sure long-dead warriors aren’t forgotten."
The roots of John Knox’s despondence are lost to history. But his suicide made the newspaper: In 1895, he tied one end of a rope around his neck and the other around a stone block. Then he threw himself into Baltimore’s harbor.
A document in Knox’s pocket identified him as an army pensioner but included no next of kin, according to a brief account in the Baltimore Sun. He was sent to a pauper’s grave and forgotten for more than 120 years.
Then two workers at the city’s Green Mount Cemetery came across his story and applied for a grave marker through a little-known law passed in 1879. It requires the federal government to ship a headstone anywhere in the world for anyone who served in the U.S. military, not just those who died in combat or buried in military cemeteries.
The result is a granite plaque on a leafy hillside of the historic graveyard. It reads, in part: “Sgt. John W. Knox, Medal of Honor.”
It’s one of more than 167 such markers, tombstones and medallions that the cemetery workers Shawn Ward and Lyle Garitty have installed in the graveyard to memorialize forgotten men and women who did their duty in conflicts as far back as the Revolutionary War.
They are among the most active of what the Department of Veterans Affairs says is a growing number of history buffs, Boy Scout troops and others who have taken up the cause of long-dead warriors.
Pupils at a high school in Ohio installed more than 70 headstones in historic cemeteries near their school.
An Orlando resident secured 61 headstones for veterans of the Spanish-American War and other conflicts at Mount Peace Cemetery in St. Cloud, Florida.
Last year, VA’s National Cemetery Administration shipped 112,459 headstones, plaques and other “memorial products” to private graveyards, said Eric Powell, director of Memorial Products Service for the NCA. The government doesn’t keep track of how many are for historic graves, but most are for recent deaths.
Many of the memorial products center on Black graveyards. The government granted white veterans the right to a free headstone shortly after the Civil War, but the privilege wasn’t extended to Black soldiers until President Harry S. Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948.
That was too late for many of the veterans buried at Lebanon Cemetery, a Black graveyard opened in 1872 in York, Pennsylvania. A local group, the Friends of Lebanon Cemetery, has installed 17 government-issued headstones on graves that never had one or were marked with wooden ones that had rotted away, said Samantha Dorm, a volunteer with the group.
Record-keeping for African American soldiers was “an afterthought” for much of history, she says. That made it difficult to procure the necessary documentation to satisfy VA. It wasn’t until 1977 that the government declared women who served in units such as the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs in World War II, to be veterans.
HOW TO REQUEST A GRAVE MARKER
To get a grave marker, an applicant must provide documentation of a veteran’s honorable discharge of service in the federal armed services and certify that his or her grave is unmarked or marked with a badly deteriorated headstone.
In some cases, VA will even provide a plaque or marker — though not a tombstone — if it can be proved that the body has gone missing. That’s how Ward and Garitty were able to procure a marker for Knox, whom they believe is buried under a road.
The stones come in granite or marble and weigh more than 200 pounds. They are shipped free, but applicants must pay for the installation if it’s in a private cemetery.
Paul LaRue found a ready supply of volunteers while he was a social studies teacher at Washington High School in the rural hamlet of Washington Court House, Ohio. He was leading a field trip to a cemetery when a student asked about the poor condition of headstones over some soldiers’ graves. After a bit of research, he learned about VA’s headstone program and launched a project to have students research the buried veterans, order and then install markers. They put up about 70 of them between 2002 and 2012 in six graveyards around southern Ohio.
“It was really a great way to connect the students to the community and their history,” said LaRue, who retired from teaching and is now president of the Ohio State Board of Education.
SCOURING THE ARCHIVES
In the six years they’ve been at it, Baltimore’s Ward and Garitty have become a two-man honor guard, putting up markers and helping like-minded enthusiasts from Pennsylvania to western Maryland.
Ward and Garitty, veterans themselves, have scoured military archives, city death records and handwritten ledgers in the cemetery’s office. They’ve found soldiers, sailors and aviators whose graves were never marked or whose tombstones were lost or damaged. Their freshly carved, white stone slabs and polished bronze markers stand out amid the weathered monuments of Green Mount. They form a sort of granite Facebook of American history.
There’s one for Pvt. David Mumma, who served in a battalion of ethnic Germans from Maryland and Pennsylvania who fought under George Washington at the Battle of Trenton. Another marks the grave of Aquila Randall, a Maryland militiaman killed in the 1814 British invasion of Baltimore that inspired the national anthem. Fighter pilot Richard Seth, a standout lacrosse player at the U.S. Naval Academy, was lost at sea during the Korean War.
“Being a veteran, I wanted to do what I could to be sure all veterans get the recognition they deserve,” said Garitty, an administrator and historian at Green Mount."
The Pickaway County W.P.A. Cemetery Plat Maps have been added to the right sidebar of the blog.
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Pickaway County is primarily a rural county.
It was perhaps even more so when these maps were drawn up during the decade of the 1930s; during the years of the Great Depression when the W.P.A. program was in place.
On the Cemetery Index Page, there are 57 cemeteries listed with the word "Farm" in their names.
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Circleville is the county seat of Pickaway County.
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These W.P.A. Cemetery Plat Maps have been recently placed on the Pickaway County Recorder's website in .pdf format.
Above is a photograph posted here with permission from the photographer of the large gray granite memorial monument for Revolutionary War veterans who were buried in Pickaway County but whose exact location is unknown.
This monument is at Forest Cemetery in Circleville.
Capt. Eleazer Williamson is included on the list.
However, in the Pickaway County collection of W.P.A. Cemetery Plat Maps, Yankeetown Cemetery is shown as being in Monroe Township, Pickaway County which is next to the border with Fayette County.:
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