Butler author uncovers graves at North Side Cemetery moved from Butler Middle School site
Rumors that there were once bodies buried under the Butler school on the corner of North and McKean streets sound like just that: rumors crafted by the students of the building hoping to create an urban legend for their younger colleagues.
However, not only were these rumors true, they are documented in Butler County records, which show that officials of Butler’s public school district voted to move a cemetery from the land in 1905 so it could be the site of a new school building.
The bodies that were buried in that cemetery would end up at North Side Cemetery, where some of the about 760 bodies are marked with headstones — with many more in a mass burial site marked by a single headstone.
This information is all shared in a book recently written by Butler County native LuAnn Kennedy Cherry, “The Old Butler Graveyard.” For her book, Cherry scoured Butler County’s records, as well as countless newspapers and periodicals from the 1800s on, to find out not only who was in the Old Butler Graveyard, but how many people were buried there and moved to North Side.
According to Cherry, the unnamed “Old Butler Graveyard” is documented in county records as early as 1804, It was the resting place for some of the people who helped establish the “Borough of Butler.” This includes the namesake for a street that runs through Butler.
“John Cunningham, who gave some of the land to the borough was buried here,” Cherry said while walking the North Side Cemetery on Wednesday, May 7. “I never found John Cunningham’s stone, but he would have been buried in the old graveyard.
“This is the roots of Butler here.”
Cherry found through her research that the Old Butler Graveyard was used to bury people from 1804 to around 1851, and it looks to be the only place for burials in Butler from 1804 until 1830.
Cherry said a newspaper from July 13, 1894, listed the names of many of the people buried in the cemetery. Simeon Nixon published a list of 112 names for the people were buried in the cemetery who had legible gravestones, according to Cherry.
Nixon published the list so the families of the people buried in the graveyard could have them moved and designated at North Side Cemetery before the school district moved them on its own to prepare the land to build a school atop, Cherry said. However, there are estimates that there were about 760 people buried in the Butler graveyard before it was disinterred.
“Nixon wanted to rebury them in North Side the same way they were in the Old Butler Graveyard,” Cherry said.
Some of the bodies in the old graveyard did get claimed, Cherry said, but the remaining few hundred are included in a mass grave at North Side Cemetery, which is marked by a stone placed there in 2002. The stone acknowledges the significance of the people buried in the Old Butler Graveyard with its inscription.
“The first fathers and mothers of Butler County are buried here, together with some of the country’s first defenders,” the inscription says. “The remains of many early Butler Countians who died between 1804 and 1859 are in this common grave.”
In addition to finding some of Butler’s founders, Cherry also found connections to her own family thanks to one surviving and one partially-surviving headstone in the North Side Cemetery. The headstone, a thin, gray block with the inscribed letters considerably faded, can still be read when the sun hits it and reveals a thin shadows over the letters. It is a headstone for B. Anne Sedwick, whom Cherry discovered was one of her great-grandmothers.
Next to that headstone is a stone wedged into the ground, which is also difficult to read, and next to that one is a slab similar to Sedwick’s, which Cherry said likely belongs to her husband, Thomas M. Sedwick.
“I knew they were my great-grandparents, but I didn’t know they were buried here,” Cherry said. “I think it’s pretty cool.”
Cherry said many of the headstones for people brought to North Side from the Old Butler Graveyard are illegible, partially- or fully-destroyed, or even missing from the site. The many hours she spent digging through county records and newspapers equaled her time in the North Side Cemetery, literally digging out headstones and cleaning them off so they could be read.
Cherry said she scrubbed some of the gravestones that are wedged into the ground to get them to the point where their print could just barely be made out. The headstones for bodies from the Old Butler Graveyard are “anthropomorphic,” Cherry said, in that they are shaped with rounded shoulders on top and a head in between, so they can often be identified even with illegible inscriptions.
Cherry said that while the whole endeavor took several years of research and literally digging up the past, having a book compiling documents about the Old Butler Graveyard and the move to North Side Cemetery made it all worthwhile. However, there are still some unanswered questions and new information Cherry has discovered since publishing the book last year.
“There is still a lot of mystery to it,” Cherry said. “I felt like it needed to be told.”
Cherry’s book, “The Old Butler Graveyard,” is available at the Butler Art Center & Gallery, and on her website at luann-cherry-llc.square.site. Cherry also is having an event from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. May 31 at the RLA, 850 Cranberry Woods Drive, Cranberry Township.
