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Cemetery tours provide historical overview of Youngstown
cemetery tours provide historical overview of city
By Sean Barron
YOUNGSTOWN
As well-established as David Tod was in life, the size and location of his grave marker leaves little doubt that his prominence remains long after his death.
“If anything economically or politically was going on in the Mahoning Valley, he was involved,” Bill Lawson said about Tod, a Youngstown native who served one term as Ohio’s 25th governor from 1862 to 1864.
Lawson, the Mahoning Valley Historical Society’s executive director, provided a wealth of information about the Tod family while conducting one of several walking tours Saturday through Oak Hill Cemetery, 344 Oak Hill Ave., on the South Side.
The Tods and members of several other prominent Valley families are buried in the 19-acre cemetery. David Tod is buried in the family plot atop a small bluff that offers a clear view of downtown Youngstown.
Tod, who was postmaster of Warren in 1832, also was heavily active in the state’s Democratic Party. In 1847, President James K. Polk appointed him as U.S. special envoy to Brazil, which helped the two countries iron out a serious diplomatic issue between them, Lawson noted.
In 1860, the party split into the Northern and Southern Democratic parties and Tod was one of Ohio’s delegates to the Northern Democratic National Convention, at which he was chairman, Lawson continued.
Several dozen people on the tour also learned more about William Powers, whose monument is in the center of a section called The Circle.
Powers was a merchant and one of the area’s earliest settlers who came with John Young, the city’s founder, and helped establish the area’s first mill in the 1790s, Lawson explained.
Powers also organized the Youngstown Pioneer Reunions that began Sept. 10, 1874, in the city’s Opera House. Many who attended the first gathering formed what became the Mahoning Valley Historical Society in 1875, Lawson noted.
Also part of the tour was the grave of Col. James Hillman, a veteran of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Hillman was a Northumberland County, Pa., native who met Young around 1796 or 1797 and settled in Youngstown before buying a 60-acre farm. He also played a major role in developing the Mahoning Valley, Lawson noted.
“He was another Youngs-town gentleman who did well in politics at the time,” Lawson said, referring to Robert W. Tayler, who was Youngstown’s mayor from 1851 to 1852. Also in the 1850s, Tayler became the federal government’s first comptroller, he added.
Those on the walking tour also saw the monument that bears George D. Wick’s name, though Wick is not buried at Oak Hill Cemetery because he was killed April 15, 1912, when the Titanic passenger liner sank in the North Atlantic Ocean after hitting an iceberg. Wick’s body never was recovered, so he is considered to have died at sea, Lawson explained.
Numerous other Wick family members are buried nearby, however, he said.
Also mentioned during the event was William Rayen, a businessman who came to Youngstown around 1801 or 1802. When he died in 1854, his will set aside more than $31,000 for a public academy that became The Rayen School, the city’s first high school.
Lawson also talked about Henry M. Garlick, a banker and industrialist who helped spearhead an endowment drive in the 1920s. The effort was aimed at restoring Oak Hill Cemetery, which was in decline during the 1910s and ’20s mainly because of competition from other cemeteries and lack of funds to maintain it, he noted.
The tour concluded next to a mausoleum bearing the name of Maj. John A. Logan, who came to Youngstown as a member of the Ohio National Guard and who received the Congressional Medal of Honor. He fought in the Spanish-American War and was killed in 1899 during a battle in the Philippines against a guerilla insurgency, Lawson said.
Even though Oak Hill Cemetery is known for having markers and monuments named in honor of many well-known family members, the cemetery remains open for anyone, Lawson pointed out.
“Everybody’s represented here, people of every walk of life and religion,” he said. “There’s a lot of grandeur here … but it is everybody’s cemetery.”