Jenna Fawcett | Clinton County History Center

A Tale of Two Soldiers

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 14:07:32 +0000

Denver Family Obelisk at Sugar Grove Cemetery

This next article focuses on a couple of the veterans buried in Sugar Grove Cemetery. Sugar Grove has over 14,800 internments including pets, children, famous generals, and unknown soldiers (“History of Sugar Grove”). The tallest monument in the cemetery belongs to General James W. Denver (pictured below), and it is supposedly modeled after the Washington Monument. He served in the army in both the Civil War and Mexican War. Denver has many great accomplishments including being elected to the California State Senate and U.S. Congress, being named Governor of the Kansas territory, and being commissioned by President Lincoln as a brigadier general of the volunteer army. Additionally, the city of Denver, Colorado, is named after him(“History of Sugar Grove”). In the years following the war, Denver practiced law in Washington D.C. and Wilmington. Denver married Louise Rombach, daughter of prominent Wilmington banker Matthew Rombach, in 1856. The newlyweds set up housekeeping in the Rombach mansion, which is the current location of the Clinton County History Center (“History of Sugar Grove”).

Unknown Soldier’s Tombstone at Sugar Grove Cemetery

In contrast is the story of the unknown soldier who passed through Wilmington on a train in 1867, apparently making his way home after the Civil War. He became sick and died before he could give anyone his name and address, and was buried in Sugar Grove Cemetery (pictured below). His grave remained unmarked until 1890, when the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) started to provide headstones for Civil War veterans’ graves. The headstone simply reads, “Unknown Soldier” (“History of Sugar Grove”). Florence T. Hague wrote that the plot, “lies lonely and practically forgotten most of the time, but each year, when the living war veterans are remembering their dead on Memorial Day, his grave is decorated along with those of all their other buddies” (Hague n.d.).

I have been studying and researching Sugar Grove cemetery for a couple months, and what has struck me from the beginning is the serene beauty that was designed by its creator and is still experienced many years later. I chose to highlight these two very different soldiers because I believe they represent the significance of Sugar Grove Cemetery. General Denver had many great accomplishments that earned him a grand monument – one similar to the great general and president George Washington. We do not know the accomplishments of the Unknown Soldier because we do not even know his name. However, we do know that he served our country during one of its worst conflicts, and his fellow veterans made sure that he at least got a headstone. Like Ms. Hague said, veterans visit the Unknown Soldier alongside all other veterans buried in Sugar Grove Cemetery, not just those as decorated as General Denver. I am a huge fan of the musical Hamilton, and think the following lyric really represents the legacies of both General Denver and the Unknown Soldier: “Death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints. It takes and it takes and it takes”. What these two men did in their lives is irrelevant now because they are both deceased and now buried peacefully in Sugar Grove Cemetery.

Works Cited

“History of Sugar Grove.” Wilmington, Ohio. Accessed November 13, 2020. https://wilmingtonoh.org/municipal-services/sugar-grove-cemetery/history-of-sugar-grove/.

Hague, Florence T. “Unknown Soldier.” n.d..

This article was published by Clinton Co. History Center intern, Jenna Fawcett. Jenna Fawcett is a senior at Wilmington College double majoring in History and Political Science with a minor in Race, Gender, and Ethnicity Studies. Her hometown is Tiffin, Ohio. Jenna is a student worker at the Peace Resource Center and enjoys going to Spring Lobby Weekend with the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL).

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Leo Weltz: Father of Sugar Grove Cemetery

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 17:49:05 +0000

This next article in the Sugar Grove Cemetery series focuses on the landscape gardener that designed the layout of Sugar Grove: Leo Weltz. Theodore Leopold (Leo) Weltz was born on January 17, 1825 in Magdeburg, Germany (Prussia) (“History of Sugar Grove”). The social order during this time period usually only allowed for the elite and intelligent to be formally educated. However, Weltz’s father was an educated man himself, and saw after Leo’s welfare and education. Leo’s father helped develop and nurture his love of gardening and horticulture. Once Leo got into higher education, he took off in plants and gardening. Weltz attended Heidelberg University and, as a student, designed the university’s Botanical Garden (Chroust 2010). After completing his degree in horticulture and landscape gardening, Weltz was sought out for many prestigious landscaping and botanical projects.

He was given a position in the Imperial Botanical Garden of King Wilhelm, and then later became the head gardener for Nicholas I, Czar of Russia (Chroust 2010). In 1851, Leo left Germany to come to the United States. He settled first in Huntington, West Virginia, and a year later, he made his way down the Ohio River to Cincinnati where he took a job at the William E. Mears nursery in Mt. Washington (“History of Sugar Grove”). In 1855, Leo Weltz started his own nursery business and soon took on some impressive landscaping jobs. These included designing the grounds for the home of Salmon P. Chase and other large estates in the area (“History of Sugar Grove”).

Weltz was employed in 1857 by a group of concerned citizens in Wilmington, Ohio who had formed the Sugar Grove Cemetery Association (Six and Twenty Club 1989). Sugar Grove Cemetery was named for the large number of sugar maples growing on the original site. As discussed in the previous article, Weltz followed the philosophy of cemetery planning that believed that a cemetery should be park-like where people could drive in their carriages to visit deceased loved ones. The Association bought 23 acres on the west side of Wilmington, and Weltz started his work on March 5, 1858. He presented two very different layouts: one being an elliptical form with curved lines, and the other making the lots square or bounded by sight lines. Just a few months later the rugged, big-hearted German with an encyclopedic knowledge of horticulture unveiled Sugar Grove, with its hundreds of varieties of trees and plants, gracefully winding drives, and wide grassy spaces (“History of Sugar Grove”).

Though many of the trees Leo Weltz planted at Sugar Grove have succumbed to age or disease, some of the originals still stand, including domestic types such as the sugar maples that inspired the cemetery’s name, other maple varieties, oaks, beech trees, hickories, and assorted evergreens. Among the types that Leo Weltz imported were a Chinese chestnut, an amur cork tree, a cucumber magnolia, and a bald cypress. Reflected in Weltz’s attitude, love and passion of horticulture, the beauty of Sugar Grove Cemetery and his other creations is the philosophy to which he adhered and often stated, “There is no melancholy in nature” (Chroust 2010). Those who enter the peaceful, lush, welcoming grounds feel the full effect of Mr. Weltz’s philosophy of design.

Works Cited

Chroust, Carol. “Weltz left his mark on many area communities.” Greene County Dailies (Xenia, Ohio), December 17, 2010.

“History of Sugar Grove.” Wilmington, Ohio. Accessed November 13, 2020. https://wilmingtonoh.org/municipal-services/sugar-grove-cemetery/history-of-sugar-grove/.

Six and Twenty Club. “Report on Sugar Grove landscapist.” March 3, 1989.

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Rural Romantic Cemeteries

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 18:06:26 +0000

This article is the first in a new series on the history of Sugar Grove Cemetery, as well as the first step toward the creation of a walking tour video. This first installment focuses on the Rural Romantic style of cemeteries, like Sugar Grove, that came into fruition in the 1830s and 1840s. Located in Wilmington, Ohio, Sugar Grove Cemetery reflects the Rural Romantic style cemetery. Its elliptical drives and curved paths, over 200 varieties of trees and shrubs, bridges, winding stream and various levels of elevation were designed by Leo Weltz in the fashion of the Rural Romantic cemeteries popular in the mid to late nineteenth century. Naturalistic designs in Romantic style typically had curvilinear roads and paths, trees and shrubs planted in masses with asymmetrically curving perimeters, classical or rustic structures or site furniture, and rolling or rough ground planes covered in meadow-like grasses or natural vegetation, much like what was designed at Sugar Grove.

Rural Romantic Cemeteries were burial places that, unlike the typical churchyard of earlier times, were located outside developed urban areas, usually at a site with some distinguishing natural feature such as dramatic landform, existing woods or water features, or impressive distant views. The idea of burial outside city limits was considered advanced, primarily as a result of health concerns associated with the typical early American practice of internment in cramped in-town graveyards. These cemeteries were designed to provide sanctuary, solitude, quiet, adornment, and beauty. It was common, especially on Sundays, for families to picnic in cemeteries “taking long walks in the peaceful setting, thinking about the past and the future, and keeping a little bit of history alive for themselves.” Many Americans supported and promoted the Rural Romantic movement because they believed transitioning gravesites to rural areas would reduce desecration and allow loved ones to comfortably be buried together without the worry of being uprooted by the expansion of a city in the future.

The Rural Romantic cemetery movement signified a shift in the human processing of the phenomenon of death. In the place of dreary, dark burial grounds, cemeteries were to be made into celebrations of life, and the beauty surrounding it. Instead of a spanning area of holes filled with corpses of loved ones, rural cemeteries gave the deceased a new, more aesthetically pleasing home. The Rural Romantic movement is arguably the foundation of the American park movement. Leaving the city and seeking rural beauty had its merits, but was not available to all. By the end of the 19th century, the role of the cemetery as a place of escape from the city had been supplanted by the establishment of parks, and by the blurring of city and countryside as suburbia evolved. Eventually the rural cemetery and its sentimentality faded out of fashion, and the outskirts were absorbed into cities. Contemporary burial grounds, now frequently referred to as “memorial parks,” are much more somber in terms of their layout and imagery, with stark granite stones positioned in grass with only sporadic trees. However, these rural cemeteries like Sugar Grove survive within contemporary cities like Wilmington, and continue to offer a meditative respite from the bustling modern life.

Works Cited

Meier, Allison C.. “When Cemeteries Became Natural Sanctuaries.” JSTOR Daily. April 11, 2019. https://daily.jstor.org/when-cemeteries-became-natural-sanctuaries/.

Pregill, Philip and Volkman, Nancy. Landscapes in History. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1999

“The Rural Cemetery Movement.” University of Georgia Wilson Center Digital Humanities Lab. accessed October 21, 2020. https://digilab.libs.uga.edu/cemetery/exhibits/show/history/rural.

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