The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
BROWNHELM Restoring past for posterity
Current residents want to honor the final resting place of some of Lorain County’s earliest settlers.
At least two dozen people volunteered March 20 for a spring cleaning at Brown’s Lake Road Cemetery, 1863 Liberty Ave. on the east side of Vermilion.
“We’re prepping for what our plan is this summer,” said
Kate Rivet, treasurer and cemetery restoration coordinator of the Brownhelm Historical Association. The burial ground is named for Col. Henry Brown, founder of Brownhelm Township in 1817.
He purchased the land out of necessity and what must have been personal loss, because his daughter, Charlotte, was one of the first people buried there when she died in 1822.
The land was set as a public burial ground in 1836, but no municipality ever took over the land. In 1948, the western section was sold off to build a hotel whose buildings now sit vacant and deteriorating.
The preservation efforts date at least to 1993, said Rivet and Marcia DePalma, association president.
The turnout was amazing, Rivet said, as volunteers pulled up and unloaded rakes and chainsaws.
“The first task is to move all the debris from the clear part of the cemetery off to the wood line, to the brush line there,” Rivet said.
Clearing the site freshens its appearance and serves a purpose for research, she said.
This spring and summer, the association members intend to spray paint a grid of 10-foot-by-10-foot squares on the ground. That overlay will track locations of current headstones and sections where the local historians will probe underground
for additional markers.
The Brownhelm Historical Association has names of people buried there, but those outnumber the remaining grave markers, DePalma said.
The goal is to create a formal tribute with a fenced area around the stones, with a monument stone to honor all the early residents who may be memorialized in historic records, but not in the graveyard.
“We want to find as many stones as possible,” Rivet said. “We’re going to make a smaller cemetery and enclose it in a fence to preserve it, instead of having them spread all out. They get overgrown, you can’t find them, the lawnmowers hit them. That’s our plan, hopefully we’ll be done by the end of the summer. Finally this cemetery will be preserved once again.”
The novel coronavirus pandemic caused business
shutdowns and shelter-inplace orders, especially for people susceptible to severe effects of COVID-19 due to age or health conditions.
That may have helped the spring cleaning event, Rivet said.
“I think maybe it’s because people can’t wait to get out of their house,” Rivet said. “But also it’s a worthwhile cause. It’s a great day to be out here, it’s beautiful weather and this is fantastic to see this many people.”