The Byfield Cemetery in Indiana

Byfield Cemetery 1988
Indiana Department of Natural Resources

I've been adding some information about the Byfield Cemetery to the book.  One of the people that I've corresponded with remembers going there as a child when the property was still in the Byfield family.  She had some good information about the original owner of the land and led me to the answers about a few non-Byfields buried in the cemetery.

The cemetery is located near Big Creek, north of the town of Lancaster, west of highway 7 in Jennings county.  If the fields are not too high the one remaining marker can probably be seen from the road.

It appears that this little family cemetery was established by Jesse Spann, a revolutionary war veteran, who purchased land around Big Creek from the government around 1816.  He later sold that land to Horatio Byfield.  The earliest burial recorded in the cemetery is for Jesse Spann's daughter, Elizabeth in 1825.  The first Byfield buried in the cemetery is Horatio's son Alford Byfield in 1846.

The WPA recorded 15 stones in the cemetery in the 1930s.  The state of Indiana did a historical survey in 1988 and found that a previous land owner had bull-dozed all but one large stone.  I've heard that in 2012 the stone was still standing.  It's sad that this is all that is left.