caretakers tour of copley cemetery
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at this location you will be looking for a uniquely camoed bison tube. it is hid in a cemetery, so daylight hours only, and it is not placed near any headstones or in a disrespectful manner. there is some limited parking, and I have provided coords for that. also please keep your vehicle on the paved surfaces. the roads are narrow here but green spaces could be grave spaces, after all would you be happy if you went to visit the final resting place of a loved one and saw a car parked on it? one other note please return the cache as you found it and please no spoiler pictures or logs, that way every cacher can have the same hopefully fun experience when they find it.
this cache is one I have wanted to do for some time, but couldn't as there was already a cache here. originally I wanted to make this a field puzzle, where you find a marker and gather info off of it and plug that info into some type of mathematical equation to get the coords. the only problem was I rarely can find that type of cache, so I doubted my ability to hide one using that method. so instead I decided to hide a traditional cache, and add some waypoints for some of the interesting markers I was going to use with the field puzzle, and give you the option to take my tour of interesting markers.
if you decided against taking my tour, and instead opt just to find the cache, please use the parking coords nearest to the cache that I have provided. our cemetery roads are narrow and by parking at those coords your vehicle will be safely out of the way, and you will not force somebody to drive around you in the grass right over somebodies grave.
if you chose to take my tour you will start up front in the older areas of the cemetery and proceeded in a more or less orderly fashion to the cache, along the way you will see some of what I think of as "interesting markers" but not all of the markers I find interesting. if I happen to be working, and not too busy, I have a couple extras I can share with you.
now on to the tour:
from your parking spot at the posted coords head north along the cemetery road, but stay to the west your left side of the cemetery road, checking out section 1. the further north you go, the older the cemetery gets. this is also your only time your in this area if you are following my tour, as after we cross the cemetery road and enter section 2 we will be at stop 1 within a couple steps of the roads edge.
stop #1 the oldest, as observed by me, burial in this cemetery with the headstone of Wait Taylor, a white marble tablet type marker, a little thicker than tablets usually are. Wait passed in 1822 at the age of 63, according to what I can read off of his marker. while the sign out front says the cemetery was established in 1820 this is the oldest grave marker I have observed. could there be older interments going back to the founding date of 1820 that no longer are, or have never been marked? possibly. in this oldest area of the cemetery you may also find a Revolutionary War Veteran, as well as many other veterans from some of our countries earliest conflicts.
from here we will travel back south and east to a tall gray granite obelisk marker, it sits kinda by itself, with a couple white marble tablet markers to it's north side. at this location you will find stop #2 the marker for the Brewer family. what I find unusual here is the size of Mr. Brewers family. he lived to a ripe old age of 86 passing in 1856. during that time he had two wives and 13 children, who all survived to adulthood.
as a bonus stop look to the next row of markers to the east, and just a little north, and you will find the marker for Correl Taylor. it is another gray granite obelisk, but not as tall as the one for the Brewer family. Correl was a veteran of The Civil War who lost his life at Harpers Ferry on October 27 1862 at the age of 26. what many of you may not know is that as a society a lot of our funeral practices come from the Civil War time period. as a result of death occurring far away from home the practice of embalming began to be able to return the fallen soldier home to his native land and families. I could go on about other changes, but I don't want to type that much, and it's not really relevant. that could also be an added bonus if you happen to catch me working while you make the find, if desired.
from here we will continue to travel south and just a little east, to another gray obelisk. this one is in a congested area but a large gray granite upright marker that is 90 degrees to all the rest of the markers is very near it. it is on a grave space, not a traditional "headstone" at the head of a grave. from there you should see the gray granite obelisk for the Frank family, which is stop #3. what I find interesting here is that Mr. Hughes P. Frank "was killed in a cyclone" and that is what is carved into his marker. I always found it interesting that a tornado was called a cyclone back then.
from here head straight south, staying in the same row, to what looks like a pair of small white marble tablets for stop #4. the marker should say John L son of, but it has been split in half down the middle, and used to mark two burials instead of one. while I'm not sure exactly what happened here a likely sad scenario is the son John L passed, and before his grave was marked a sibling passed. in an effort to save money, that a family must not have had, they split the marker already purchased and used the now two pieces of it to mark the two graves, with the family knowing who was where. perhaps they even hoped to replace the split marker with a separate marker for each individual, but they never did, now it leaves a sad story most don't see.
from here we continue to head south to the stone vault, which is stop #5. it is a structure you most likely noticed as soon as you entered the cemetery. it was built and used for the temporary storage of deceased who passed away in cold winter months, when my predecessors who opened graves with hand tools could not do so due to the ground being frozen too deep. it is currently used for nothing and is empty. while the inner door is locked, the wrought iron outer door is not. it has a latch that you should be able to figure out how to open and close with ease. if it is a nice day, and you open the iron door slowly, it will creak and groan, just like you think it should. if it is wet, the water will act as a lubricant, and the door will open quietly.
after your done checking out the stone vault we turn and head back north, and still east, as we enter section 3 after crossing the cemetery road. not too far off of the middle cemetery road, five rows to be exact, you will find stop #6, and Christ. now this one was a source of back and forth for me, as weather to include it on my tour or not. you will find a good sized gray granite upright marker for Christ Brunner and his wife. now I've seen lots of Jesus as a name in the Spanish language, and Mohammad is not uncommon as a name, but I've never seen a Christ before. not only that, but we have two of them here! both from the same time period, more or less. so it must have been more common of a name in history than I ever realized.
now that we have that one done we're almost finished. continue north and east crossing yet another cemetery road into the veterans section. the focal point of the veterans section is the large flag pole and monument nearby. at the foot of the flag pole you will find stop #7 a group of markers for veterans of The War of 1812. a year before 2012 the 200th anniversary of that war, we received 9 markers for men who where veterans of that war, and did not have a headstone to mark their grave.
it seems a local woman here in Summit County had looked at muster records, pension records, and cemetery records for all of Summit County, in what was surely not an easy thing to do. say she had a John Smith, who was a veteran of the war according to a muster or pension record, she then looked at census data tracking John Smith and finally cemetery records. once she got to that point she then physically went to say section 2 lot 76 to see if John Smith had a marker there. if he did but did not have any recognition as a veteran she installed a veterans flag holder at his grave so in the future he would get a flag placed on his final resting place on Memorial Day. if he did not have a marker she made a note of it, and jumped through all the hopes necessary to secure the deserved veterans marker for that individual.
here in Copley Township we had 9 unmarked 1812 veteran graves, and we got 9 markers. now here is where it gets a little tricky. one of these men we knew to be at Montrose Cemetery, a smaller township cemetery north of here. we knew where he was according to our records, and we installed his marker as a headstone. the other 8 men rested here, and here is the tricky bit, our records only gave us the location of 5 of them. so it was decided after some consultation, it seems other cemeteries had found similar short comings in very old records, that a "central place of honor" was the best route to take in installing those markers.
at this point you will have completed the tour portion of this cache, and you will have a short walk to the find the actual cache and sign the log. if you have chosen to take the tour I hope you find it interesting, if you decided to just find the cache I hope you find that interesting as well. perhaps you may chose to look around on your own and you may find something interesting to you that I didn't highlight with a waypoint. that reminds me I almost forgot to mention some more of the bonus sights/stories I might share if you happen to find me at work. they include a possible Confederate Veteran? some odd survey type markers that indicate "perpetual care"? not sure what that bill of sale cost, or if the grass wasn't mowed like it is now or what, and speaking of surveying how I know where to dig a grave.
congratulations for the FTF goes out to CarpenterLuvaKatCrew on 6-13-16, and it was nice that I was at work and got to chat with them a bit after they made the find.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
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