Wayne County Home Cemetery.
I’ve been itching to get back out and look for interesting new cemeteries to explore. Every time I think I’ve checked out everything interesting in the area I manage to dig up something new I hadn’t seen before. I don’t know how but I ended up searching on the FindAGrave app in the Wooster, OH area. It’s only a little over an hours drive away so not a bad drive if I were to find something cool.
As luck would have it, the area is cemetery central. SO many of them! I was mainly browsing for larger ones but using the list feature I managed to spot “Wayne County Home Cemetery” With only 324 burials, it wasn’t the numbers that excited me – it was the name. “Home” generally meaning the county home or infirmary. Most of the time the people who died in these places didn’t have family to claim their body or the means to provide for their own burial so the home would take care of that for them. The headstones in places like this are usually the bare minimum, no names just numbers. …And that was if you were lucky enough to get one. Unmarked graves certainly weren’t uncommon.
Despite doing fairly extensive research on cemeteries like this I still had yet to visit one. The majority of the nearby ones are actually looked after fairly well… at least by security so I was a bit nervous about making the drive to this one thinking that I might not be able to explore. As luck would have it, it’s actually in the middle of nowhere. I felt like I went down a million little roads lined with cornfields before I finally got there. It was worth the drive.
I thought I had a pretty decent idea of the history of this cemetery. A really interesting story that I was excited to share because it added so much punch to the whole place. I do minimal research of the places I want to visit before hand just to save myself the let down of getting super excited and then not being able to check them out. I dig in after I get home. When I went to confirm and fact check my story for this place though… I came up completely empty handed.
I am so incredibly confused. I swear up and down I read on multiple sites the history of this cemetery. My searches come up with nothing now. I even went through my browser history… still nothing. My only guess is that I simply read about so many other cemeteries I confused one of their stories with this place.
So, I don’t have any back story for you on this cemetery, just that it was established in 1852, but I still think the photos alone are very powerful. There were only a two or three plots that had newer headstones with a name. (One of which was a child that died on my birthday. Spooky!) The rest were simple stones marked simply with a number. Only one of those was decorated.
Check out even more interesting graveyards under the “cemeteries” tag!
