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November 18, 2004
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November 18, 2004 |
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Honoring history and a township pioneer
Looking very natural in a blue-and-red infantryman’s coat adorned with gold buttons, William Ellerman came from the Montgomery County Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution to honor Owen Davis at the Clifton Cemetery last Thursday on Veteran’s Day. Davis, an area miller who served in the Revolutionary War, received the first of a hundred headstones the Clifton Union Cemetery Board and Clifton Historical Society hope to repair or replace in the 200-year-old cemetery. Pam Adams, a member of the Yellow Springs Historical Society, stood in the cold drizzle with 30 Clifton and Yellow Springs residents to install the new headstone where Davis was originally laid. Born in Wales in 1759, Davis settled in Greene County on land he received from his military service, Adams said. Davis built the county’s first mill and the county’s first courthouse, where his son-in-law Benjamin Whiteman presided. By 1804 Davis was living in Clifton, then known as Davis Mills, where he built a sawmill, a distillery, a tavern and a gristmill before he died in 1818. “He and others like him are owed a debt of gratitude for their hard work and the suffering they endured in hopes of a better life for us, their descendants,” Adams said during the commemoration. “Today, the inscription on the stone that marks the grave of Owen Davis can no longer be read. We offer this new stone in order that he and his pioneer spirit are not forgotten.” Davis’s gravestone, the first to be replaced, was donated by Dodd’s Monument Company. Six cemetery markers that were leaning were reinstalled on the grounds over the summer, and two other veterans’ plaques have been re-erected. But with many of the markers in pieces that need to be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, Adams estimates that repairs for the others will cost between $100 and $200 per marker. The gravestone restoration project will continue as funds allow. Both the Miami Township and Greene Township Boards of Trustees have pledged $500 a year, plus $2,100 from the cemetery board and $100 from the sale of each new gravesite. Adams considers the project well worth the effort to preserve the reminders of those who settled first in this area and were part of shaping early America. “I consider a cemetery an outdoor free museum,” she said. The Clifton Cemetery, the oldest public cemetery in Miami Township, holds the graves of more than 2,000 people, including some of Miami Township’s first white settlers, pioneer farmers and hundreds of cholera victims, who are buried in an unmarked mass grave.
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