After road construction disturbed Steuben’s burial site in 1804, his former aide and estate executor Benjamin Walker moved the baron’s body to a five-acre wooded area now called the Sacred Grove. Walker then donated 50 acres, including the grave site, to the Welsh Baptist Society, which agreed to maintain and preserve the grove. In 1824, amid renewed patriotic fervor after the War of 1812, citizens of Oneida County placed a simple limestone marker inscribed STEUBEN over the grave. By 1857, that marker had deteriorated, prompting German-American societies and newspapers to raise funds for a permanent memorial, completed in 1872 with assistance from New York State to honor Steuben’s leadership in the struggle for American independence. To mark the bicentennial of the baron’s 1730 birth, New York State created the 50-acre Steuben Memorial State Historic Site with the Sacred Grove at its center. When Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the site on September 12, 1931, the historic trail from the west was paved as an empty drive, its parking lot was fenced, and the area outside the Sacred Grove was planted with rows of Norway spruce said to represent the rank and file of Valley Forge. In 1936, the state built and furnished a replica log cabin to interpret the baron’s life, based on an 1857 engraved version of an 1802 pencil drawing by Reverend John Taylor. In the 1990s, land where the baron’s original cabin had stood was donated to the state and is located nearby.