Byron Cemetery began with the 1837 burial of Theodore H. Provost, the son of one of Byron’s founders. According to local historians, Chippewa lived on this site before it became a cemetery. It contains about sixteen hundred nineteenth-century graves, including the remains of fifty-six Civil War soldiers and veterans. Among them is James Sleeth, a wartime surgeon who later became a lawyer and newspaper publisher, and a large pedestal with crossed rifles honors unknown Civil War dead. Graves are marked by fieldstones from local farms, urns, obelisks, and monuments bearing common Christian symbols such as angels and weeping willows. In keeping with Judeo-Christian tradition, burials are oriented east to west, except for the grave of Richard Tubman, a thirty-five-year-old Irish horse groom, whose grave is marked by a pulpit with a closed book and oriented north to south. A seated maiden honors Ellen May Tower, a Spanish-American War nurse who died of typhoid fever in Puerto Rico in 1898.