The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
‘Lake Shore Cemetery of Avon Lake’ showcases the past
Nestled on the banks of Lake Erie, a small cemetery holds the stories of some of Avon Lake’s first residents.
Avon Lake historian Sherry Newman Spenzer has authored a new book, “Lake Shore Cemetery of Avon Lake,” documenting some of the stories behind the approximately 200 residents at rest with roots dating back to the American Revolution.
The cemetery, making up a third of an acre on the city’s majestic lakefront near the intersection of Lake and Avon Belden roads, was granted historic designation in 2013.
“The temptation to romanticize the past can be seductive, but the
lives of Avon Lake’s dearly departed were not so very different from those of the people of its present,” Spenzer writes. “The stories of the ‘residents’ of Avon Lake’s only graveyard offer a snapshot of an early community life in which its members met and married each other, cheated on and divorced each other, sheltered and sued each other, endured scandal and loss, did political battle, administered medical aid and buried each other.”
Spenzer is a retired magistrate, local historian and the vice president of Heritage Avon Lake, the city’s historical society.
Formerly known as the Avon Lake Cemetery, Spenzer says the book is a work 16 years in the making capturing some of the city’s lost history.
“I started collecting information 16 years ago, and not as aggressively for the last several years when I realized if I don’t put this together in a book, it may be lost,” she said.
It is believed the cemetery’s first interments were those of French fur trappers and Native Americans to which no markers exist, Spenzer said.
The cemetery includes the remains of a Revolutionary War soldier, sailors wounded in the Battle of Put-In-Bay during the War of 1812 and soldiers from both world wars along with some familiar names to longtime Avon Lake residents.
One of the most interesting headstones comes from a long-standing local legend.
In 1813, the bodies of two sailors from the Battle of Put-In Bay washed ashore near Avon Lake’s cemetery and were buried by a passerby.
“Though discounted by some of Avon Lake’s early historians as an unlikely tale, the legend persisted and a marker was placed memorializing the unidentified local seamen,” Spenzer wrote.
In 2015, the legend was confirmed as truth when the fallen seamen were identified by local author and historian William Krejci as Richard Williams and Henry VanPoole.
During their transport to Pennsylvania for their injuries, they became ill with typhus and their bodies were thrown overboard.
They were identified through records in a letter to Naval Secretary William Jones dated Sept. 22, 1813.
“Many of the headstones are the same as names that are in the streets here in Avon Lake,” Spenzer said. “And so those are the obvious and interesting stories, which are just as interesting as the stones you don’t see.”
The names of Moore, Jaycox, Dunning and Tomanek run through the cemetery, capturing the stories of some of Avon Lake’s earliest settlers.
Joseph Moore served as one of Gen. George Washington’s body guard near the end of the Revolutionary War.
Moore Road was named after the family three or four generations down the line.
The book documents the journey of Samuel and Sarah Jaycox, who settled in Avon Lake in 1828.
Their graves describe their January 1855 demise as “death caused by suffocation by a kettle of coals in their sleeping room.”
The couple would inspire the name of Jaycox Road, a major thoroughfare running north-south into Avon.
The oldest legible headstone belongs to that of Edmunds Tower, of Ira, Vt.
Elements and age have darkened the stone.
It describes his death by drowning at the age of 22.