WEST LIBERTY – Champaign County Preservation Alliance invites attendees to a new program at Mt. Tabor Church and Cemetery on Oct. 13 from 1-3 p.m.
Cost is $15.
Children 12 and under will be admitted free.
The church and cemetery are located on state Route 245 in Salem Township.
Activities will include choral entertainment, an Old-Fashioned Sing-A-Long, church and cemetery history, prizes, and refreshments. Attendees will learn of funeral practices through the years and how they have changed. Visitors can stroll the cemetery and discover the meanings of “memorial symbols” along the way.
According to information from the Champaign County Historical Society, the first Mt. Tabor Church, a log meeting house, was erected on this site in 1816. It stood on land originally selected by Griffith and Martha Evans for a graveyard at the death of their daughter circa 1812.
Deeds show the Evans family gave two and one half acres of land “for the purpose of erecting a meeting house and establishing a burying site.” Camp meetings, religious gatherings popular in frontier Ohio, were held on the hillside west of the meeting house. Simon Kenton was converted at a Mt. Tabor camp meeting in 1819.
The log meeting house burned in 1824 and was replaced with a brick church on the same spot. In 1881, the present brick church was completed and dedicated. The cemetery at Mt. Tabor basically surrounds the church on three sides.
Although the date of death of Griffith and Martha Evans’s small daughter varies according to county histories, it indisputably was the first burial in what was to become Mt. Tabor Cemetery. Veterans of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II are interred in the cemetery. Harley Woodard, a local stone carver, furnished many of the gravestones. The cemetery is renowned for its three cast zinc monuments. Far more uncommon than the usual stone monuments, these hollow grave markers, with their distinctive bright gray color, were produced only briefly during the 1880s and 1890s.
Tickets are available at The Peoples Savings Bank and ccpapreserveohio.org.
Proceeds benefit the maintenance of the Mt. Tabor Church and the CCPA Matching Facade Grant Program.
