Old Colony Burying Ground, 1805

Granville, Ohio, was settled in 1805 by the Licking Company, a group formed in Granville, Massachusetts, and Granby, Connecticut, to emigrate west. The Old Colony Burying Ground was defined on the first town plat of Granville in 1805, and many of Granville's pioneers are interred there. The cemetery retains its original form and most of its westward-facing rows of sandstone and marble gravestones, and the early settlers buried there helped lay out the town and shaped the village's appearance and development. The first burial, the infant son of Ethan Bancroft, took place in April 1806, and the oldest extant gravestone is dated 1808. Buried there are eighteen veterans of the Revolutionary War, thirty-nine from the War of 1812, and sixteen Civil War veterans, along with ministers, farmers, industrialists, physicians, young mothers, children, and other citizens of Granville. Its signed and masterfully carved monuments and gravestones preserve a history of gravestone motifs between 1808 and 1880 and include excellent examples of the work of local carvers and sculptors such as Thomas and Rollin Hughes, Manley Whipple, and the DeBow brothers. The early markers are of locally quarried sandstone, while many later ones are of marble shipped to Granville via the Granville Feeder from the Ohio and Erie Canal. In 1886, Charles Webster Bryant recorded and numbered the location and epitaphs of all visible gravestones, preserving important historic information no longer visible today. The cemetery has been called the Old Colony Burying Ground since 1912, when wrought-iron entrance gates were erected by the Granville Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

Granville, Ohio · United States