BATH | In an area as older than American Revolution and larger than Rhode Island, untold men, women and children lie quietly underground, in the shade and sun.
Those people helped carve Steuben County from raw wilderness, worked the land and built businesses. They fought in the early American wars, the world wars, the far-off wars. They raised families, and dreamed dreams.
They turned a county into a home.
And in many areas, no one even knows they are there.
“They are sacred places,” said Helen Kelly Brink, of Bath. “They are our history.”
So Brink and her co-partner, a mixed-breed schnoodle named Cricket, decided to go on an adventure, scouring the area to update information on cemeteries.
A member of the Steuben County Historical Society, Brink used former county Historian Charles Oliver’s extensive records to locate burial grounds.
However, Oliver’s records, completed in 1980, did not take into account the county’s 911 road name changes.
There were other dramatic changes, Brink said.
Long-gone roads or inaccurate directions made locating some old cemeteries difficult to find. In other areas, cemeteries had disappeared, due to neglect, or because they had been covered by roads.
Brink told town officials about the abandoned graveyards, and in many cases town workers cleared up the debris.
“I got some of my best support from highway crews. They were just great at fixing up,” Brink said.
It took Brink and Cricket four years and several return trips to locate information, now compiled on the county society book, “Steuben County Cemeteries – Good, Bad, and Gone.”
The book includes a list of all the cemeteries located in each of the 32 towns in the county, and includes the first person buried there, and other items of local interest. If the cemetery is no longer active, the last person buried also is listed.
Pictures of each cemetery are included in the book, along with general maps.
Directions to each location are available at the county historical society, Brink said.
The two-year odyssey was well worth the time and effort for Cricket and Brink, a retired school nurse from Rochester, who moved to the area some 10 years ago.
“We located a cemetery with its own two-holer (outhouse) and one that has a plot reserved for a U.S. president,” she wrote in the book’s forward. “We have visited overgrown and abandoned cemeteries, and ones that have been long gone, leaving no indication they existed.”
