Klinefelter Cemetery - c. 1820
Story of the Founding of Klinefelter Cemetery
Transcribed from an ABJ article dated August 25, 1904: Among the early settlers of Green Township was a man named Rhodes who died in the winter of 1819-20. It was found that his children did not have sufficiently warm clothing to make the journey and so Conrad Dillman, a benevolent and public-spirited citizen of the township, who had come from Pennsylvania in 1815, deeded a parcel in the southwest corned of what is now the Henry Oberlin quarter, for a free public burying ground. Thus a convenient resting place is found for Pioneer Rhodes and his grave was the first in the new cemetery. It is of interest to know that one of the little girls who did not have the necessary clothes to go to her father’s funeral, afterwards became the wife of a millionaire. She married one of the Crocker brothers who in connection with Collis P. Huntington and Leonard Stanford made immense fortunes of the construction of the first Pacific Railroad. The old gentleman’s grave is still without a headstone.
Not far from the grave of Mr. Rhodes is that of an aged pioneer known among the early settlers as “Father Hendricks,” who had fought under Washington in the was of the Revolution. The old patriot after serving his country faithfully through the Revolutionary War, finds his final resting place in an old, abandoned cemetery. The only thing to mark his grave is a little slab of sandstone erected by his friend, Conrad Dillman, and bearing the simple initials, “K.H.” At the time Conrad Dillman established the burying ground there was neither church, society or other like organization in the township and so in accordance with an old Pennsylvania German custom, he deeded the land “to God.” The deed, however, does not seem to have been put on record in the court house in Canton. Green Township formed a part of Stark County at that time and it has been said that the recorder refused to put the conveyance on record because the grantee was unknown in Stark County.   |
Cemetery Inscriptions - Geneological Records Comm. Cuyahoga-Portage Chapter DAR, 1957 Courtesy of the Bev Keppler-Coss Collection, Akron Public Library /uploads/3/4/4/0/3440706/2_klinefelter_cemetery.pdf  Akron Beacon Journal, August 25, 1904 |