Mystery shrouds deserted, neglected Youngstown cemetery

By AMANDA TONOLI and KALEA HALL

news@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Tod Hidden Cemetery

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Names released of individuals buried in an overlooked potter's field within Tod Cemetery.

The year is 1911. Life is hard and death comes easy.

Most people are in the working class, and when they die, a funeral of today’s making is not likely.

A simple funeral and burial taken care of by your family or community is what you’ll get.

Down an uneven path off of Tod Homestead Cemetery are thousands of these burials that seem to have been forgotten.

“Those are ancestors of people living in Youngstown, right now, that have no idea where their grandmothers are buried,” said Rocky Falleti, the Archaeological Society of Ohio Mahoning Valley chapter’s president.

THE FORGOTTEN CEMETERY

Chunks of pavement and overgrown plants make up the remnants of a road that leads back to an area of divots in the land at the southern part of Tod Homestead Cemetery.

The divots are indentations in the earth from weak coffins caving in from decay.

In the cemetery board’s meeting minutes on June 7, 1911, Volney Rogers, Tod Homestead Cemetery board president and acting chairman at the time, sold Youngstown Township trustees nearly 2 acres south of the present Tod cemetery. The land was to be used strictly for burials.

The agreement was for the township to pay $3,000 up front and $6,000 altogether over the course of one year for the land.

“They paid us, it’s in our ledger, and we dug graves up until 1933,” said Ken Sommers, Tod Homestead Cemetery superintendent. “In 1933, that was our last burial. Then there’s nothing – no more payments and no more burials there.”

The last burial in this section was Marie Clemeto, March 3, 1933.

From there, Sommers said he is unable to find any other information involving payments or any documentation about the area.

Youngstown Township was annexed to the city of Youngstown in November 1913. Parts of Boardman, Liberty and Coitsville townships also were affected in 1929 and 1930 when additional annexations occurred.

A rumored dissociation from the property between the city and Tod in the 1930s is what Sommers said may be responsible for the unmaintained land.

More knowledge on this cemetery may be lost forever. Fred Sloan, former Tod superintendent who served until 1958 and died in 1963, could have known more about it, Sommers said. A stroke made communication difficult for Sloan, so he may have been unable to pass along his knowledge to the next superintendent, Frank Sikora.

“I struggled with what we should ever do with it,” Sommers said. “It’s been 83 years since the last burial. Should we bring heavy equipment in here and take these trees out and bring soil in, regrade it and level it off? Or should we let it go? It’s gone back to nature, and it’s been this way for, that I could speak of, 40 years. ... If push came to shove I would take it to the board who would probably say to mow it, maintain it and maybe put a plaque in.”

Sommers wonders if heavy equipment would destroy the graves because he knows so little of the layout and depth at which people were buried.

The little records that remain are name cards labeled “city section” that show who is buried there.

“In what we do here, record-keeping is so important,” Sommers said. “There are no grave markers – nothing. And because it was a potter’s field, headstones weren’t allowed.”

A potter’s field is a burial place for unknown or indigent people.

Sommers said the formerly bulldozed-look to the path might have been a way to delineate where Tod’s responsibility stopped and another’s began.

“They shut it off from the other parts of the cemetery,” Falleti said.

Falleti wonders if the separation was because at the time Tod leaders didn’t want to be financially responsible for what they believed was the township and later the city’s responsibility.

“They just shoved it off into the woods,” he said. “It’s all overgrown.”

Mounds of dirt outline the divots, marking each sunken grave.

“Who let it get like this?” Sommers questioned. “Was it Tod Cemetery? Was it the city? I just don’t know.”

Sean McKinney, city building and grounds commissioner, said he did not know of any past maintenance concerning Youngstown Township Cemetery and suggested contacting Martin Hume, city law director.

Hume said he knew nothing about Youngstown Township Cemetery and suggested calling elsewhere – to which he had no suggestion – to find out information.

“You know, when push comes to shove, it is on our property,” Sommers said.

Falleti said he’d like to see the 2 acres cleaned up and have some kind of signage acknowledging the people buried, for their ancestors’ sakes.

THE LIST

Tod Homestead Cemetery provided The Vindicator with a list of the names of the more than 1,800 people buried in the “city” section. The first burial was of an unknown person in August 1911.

Several of those buried are listed as infants. The list includes miscellaneous information about how some of those buried in this section died. The list shows several railroad accident deaths. Suicide, alcoholism, accidental drowning, heat and pneumonia are some of the other causes.

“Especially in the first two decades of the 20th century there were so many hazards for life,” said Bill Lawson, director of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society.

Diseases, such as pneumonia, affected the youngest and oldest the most. Those who survived built up strong immune systems.

Men in the workforce were surrounded by deathly hazards. Also, the water that people drank was the same water used by industrial companies, and the water treatment was minimal. The water then got to households through pure lead pipes.

“There was a lot of microbial and small material in the water,” Lawson said.

Antibiotics weren’t around back then, so if someone got sick with an infection, the body had to fight it off itself.

With dirtier, crammed living conditions, illness could spread easily. In the first three decades of the 1900s, the city’s population went from 45,000 to 170,000 in a city that was smaller than it is today.

Infant mortality was high, explaining the number of infants buried in the cemetery. Lawson noted the lack of immunizations for polio, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, mumps and rubella – all of which affected children most.

“Advancements in medicine have greatly reduced infant mortality, and having a stable clean water source,” Lawson said. “This has all greatly improved the quality of life.”

Many of those listed in this section of the cemetery died in 1918 and 1919 and could have been victims of the Spanish influenza.

The first Youngstown death from the influenza hit in October 1918. At the time, there were 72 other cases reported, according to Vindicator archives.

“Claiming new victims hourly, the Spanish influenza epidemic continues to spread unabated throughout the city,” an October 1918 story in The Vindicator states.

This flu – which killed about 50 million people – particularly targeted young, healthy adults. The flu’s symptoms would typically form into pneumonia.

“It was a terrible infection and epidemic here in the U.S. for two flu seasons,” Lawson said.

Back in the early 1900s, diseases, accidents and simple illnesses could easily lead to death. Funerals for the working class took place in the parlor of a home. The rich or those who knew people had a headstone.

“If you couldn’t afford to bury a family member, it was up to a political subdivision to do it,” Lawson said. “You had a very simple burial.”