Retiree finds new life in restoring old cemeteries
BUTLER, Ohio – As a youngster growing up in the Mansfield area in the 1970s, Ronny Echelberger spent days exploring cemeteries across Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania with his mother, studying their family history.
“I guess I got a love of genealogy from my mom,” said Echelberger, 58, who now lives in Columbus. He spoke recently from the remote grounds of the Pine Run Cemetery in Worthington Township in Butler, Richland County.
That love for genealogy brought Echelberger, who is retired after 23 years in the U.S. Army and another three with the U.S. Forest Service, back to Ohio in 2017 “to add to research (his mother) started 50 years ago.”
That project was locating the grave of his great-great-grandfather, reportedly buried in the Dickson Cemetery outside of Bellville, a village near Mansfield.
“Problem was, no one seemed to know where the Dickson Cemetery was,” Echelberger said as he discussed how he got into his retirement passion of restoring old – and for the most part, abandoned – cemeteries in Richland and Ashland counties.
Now, pretty much any day that weather permits, Echelberger drives north from his Columbus home to work on one of five cemeteries that he’s taken under his wing. They’re in Worthington, Washington and Monroe townships in Richland County, and Vermillion Township in Ashland County.
Echelberger discovered the Dickson Cemetery while home on leave from the Army in 2008, hidden in woods off Possum Run Road in Washington Township.
But it wasn’t until 2017, after he retired, that he began his quest to restore the cemetery, “starting with education, learning as much as I could on cemetery restoration in two preservation workshops in Massachusetts sponsored by the National Parks Service.”
Tools and technology
Echelberger spent that first summer preserving the eight graves in the Dickson Cemetery, he said.
“Later, through the Bellville Genealogical Society, I found documents outlining where other people were buried, including my great-great-great-grandfather, buried in the Pine Run Cemetery southeast of Butler.”
His work at the Dickson Cemetery was dramatic. He produced a photo that he took in 2008, showing mostly brush engulfing the stones, and noted, “it is all cleared now.”
Echelberger works with basic tools: shovels, picks, brushes and metal probes (to find buried stones), and with technology: a laptop computer to store cemetery and burial records, genealogy reports and other information, and hundreds of photos of stones and other cemetery work that he’s done.
“Cemetery stones used in Ohio have evolved,” he said. “The earliest were made of brown sandstone, and you find our earliest settlers buried under these long, straight stones, which are so soft that most of the engravings on them are faded or worn away.
“Later, marble was used – a little harder so the engravings last, but more prone to cracking and breaking,” he said. “Finally, granite – much harder – came into use and continues today.”
The oldest grave that Echelberger has found, in the Pine Run Cemetery, was dated 1810, and showed that the person was born in 1772, before the Revolutionary War.
“I also found records of a veteran of the War of 1812 was buried in the cemetery, but I have yet to find his grave,” he said.
Vermillion Township, and most of the western side of Ashland County, was part of Richland County until Ashland County was formed in 1846. That means its burials are included in the Richland County veterans grave project.
“Connecting some names to other cemeteries, I started working there,” he said.