A gravedigger once told my dad that the dirt is black and rich six feet down at Salem, the legacy of countless tallgrass prairie seasons cycling under endless sky. Everyone in this community forged by death was tied somehow to the land in life and it remains a good place for an old farmer to take his rest.
The first to be buried here beside a fold in the prairie as it begins to break toward the Chariton River was a Mormon refugee moving toward the woods and water at Chariton Point two miles northwest during the 1840s, carrying in his head Brigham Young’s vision of New Zion in the intermountain West.
The most recent, during 2006, was a farm wife in her 94th year who carried memories of a full life on the farm just across the road as she traveled toward home.
Time and the prairie wind have swept away the Mormon pioneer’s name and the exact location of his grave, but the memory of Ora Gartin still is fresh and lively as grass heals the wound inflicted when her grave was dug.
SALEM is located in the southwest quarter of Section 3, Benton Township, two miles southeast of Chariton and two and a half miles due west of Russell, just south of the intersection of the Blue Grass and New York roads.
The Blue Grass Road here follows the path of the old Mormon Trace, the trail blazed from Dodge’s Point in Appanoose County northwest past old Greenville and then due west through what became Russell to Chariton Point and beyond by Mormons during the late spring and the early summer of 1846. The Trace was used thereafter by most of the thousands of Nauvoo Saints forced to flight by non-Mormon neighbors in Illinois who would not tolerate their differentness. They moved past what became Salem in ox-drawn wagons, on horseback and on foot toward Chariton Point, then Garden Grove or Mount Pisgah, across western Iowa to the Missouri River and beyond through Nebraska and Wyoming to Utah.
At Salem, the main trail was joined by a shortcut used by some of these pioneers that meandered back southeast past Ragtown, then cut directly east toward Greenville across the prairie flats south of Russell.
It may have been this convergence of trails that made it seem likelier to loved ones that a grave here would be less likely to be lost. Those who mourned had no choice other than to bury, say a prayer and move on.
DURING the roughly 160 years that have followed that first grave, approximately 300 people have been buried at Salem. Of those, about 240 graves are marked, the locations of perhaps 20 unmarked graves are known and perhaps 40 more people, known but to God, lie buried here.
These people were overwhelmingly of Scots-Irish and German descent, although there are Swedes and others, too. Most were members of three churches: Salem Methodist Episcopal (later Salem Community) Church, congregations whose building stood in front of the cemetery from the 1870s until the 1970s and from which the cemetery took its name; Mt. Carmel United Evangelical Church, four miles south; and Otterbein United Brethren in Christ, four miles southwest. The only other cemetery in Benton Township is Ragtown, a mile and a quarter southeast and long unused. For reasons now unknown, several families began to bury at Ragtown, then stopped and began using Salem. In at least one instance, a wife was buried at Ragtown and her husband, many years later at Salem.
There are Civil War veterans of both the Union and the Confederate States here, as well as veterans of World War I and World War II. There are men here who took their own lives and at least one who was murdered, women who died in childbirth and dozens of infants today‘s medical practices would have saved, many victims of tuberculosis (then called consumption) and many more who lived long and full lives. Their descendants are practically numberless now and scattered like buckshot, but this remains a community and its members still have stories to tell.
ALTHOUGH Lucas County opened for settlement during 1846, the same year the Mormon Trace was blazed, the land around the lone grave in Benton Township remained in government hands for a few years because it was open prairie, considered less desirable than timbered land.
The 160-acre tract that included the grave was purchased from the U.S. government by John Howard and his wife, Mary (Sutphin) Scott/Howard, on 23 May 1850 for the going rate of $1.25 per acre. At the time it was unbroken, open and treeless prairie with only one landmark --- the grave. The Howards apparently did not live here, however.
They also had purchased land about two miles northwest along the Mormon Trace, due south of what now is the city of Chariton and encompassing part of the Chariton Point settlement. It was here, apparently, that the Howards lived until Mary’s death on 12 October 1850. According to family lore, Mary was buried first in a cemetery once located on the site of Columbus School in Chariton that was abandoned at about the time the present Chariton Cemetery was developed, in the early 1860s. Her remains were removed to the new cemetery and according to some accounts were the first to be buried in it.
Aaron Salter Scott, buried with several family members at Salem, was a son of Mary (Sutphin) Scott/Howard by her first marriage, to Jacob Scott, and the grave of Henry T. Scott, infant son of Aaron S. and Elizabeth A. (Wells) Scott, who died 14 December 1853, is the earliest marked grave at Salem.
Not long after Mary’s death, John Howard disposed of his holdings in Lucas County and moved “back east” to Jefferson County, Iowa, where he married as his second wife a woman named Gracie.
The prairie farm in Benton Township went to Margaret (Sutphin) Hobson, a sister of Mary (Sutphin) Scott/Howard, whose husband, Joseph Hobson, had died 4 September 1849 in Van Buren County and who had been buried in the Bonaparte Cemetery where his grave still may be found.
On 14 February 1852, John and Gracie Howard (then of Lockridge Township, Jefferson County) sold the 160-acre cemetery farm to Margaret for $100 and she moved there with some of her children, including Rebecca (who married first Nelson Bell and then Chester F. Plimpton), Elizabeth Adeline (who married Francis M. Wilson), John Milburn (who married first Margaret A. Clark and then Mary Eugenia Taylor Gove) and Lucinda (who married John P. Martin).
It was Margaret and her family who broke the land and built a home probably in the southwest corner of the farm, where what I still call the Johnny Jennings home is located.
It may have been during Margaret Hobson’s tenure that neighbors, including her nephew, Aaron Scott, began to bury their dead near the lone Mormon grave northeast of the Hobson home, thus forming a cemetery with a name that, if there was one, has faded into obscurity.
Margaret Hobson died 19 August 1870 and was buried in the Chariton Cemetery beside her sister, Mary (Sutphin) Scott/Howard.
Upon Margaret Hobson’s death, her son, Milburn, purchased from her estate for $1,100 140 acres of the 160-acre farm on 26 August 1870. This farm was known a century later as the George and Faye Lovell/Johnny and Ora Gartin farm (Johnny's wife was Ora Lovell, daughter of George), and it probably was the Milburn Hobsons who developed the farmstead there. The cemetery was included in this purchase.
The 20-acre tract in the southwest corner of the farm that probably included the original Hobson farmstead was sold for $500, also on 26 August 1870, to Margaret’s daughter, Adeline, who had married Francis M. Wilson.
Three years later, on 6 March 1873, Milburn Hobson sold to the Wilsons the 20-acre tract that included the cemetery.
And on the 12th of June, 1873, Adeline and Francis M. Wilson sold the cemetery site for $50 to the Salem Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church.
This is why the year “1873” is inscribed on the plaque that marks the cemetery entrance, although the burial ground itself is about 25 years older.
Soon after purchasing the land, Salem Methodist Church was built in front of (west of) the cemetery and, during 1875, the cemetery was replatted as Salem Cemetery into 52 lots, each 9 by 41 feet with space for eight or nine graves. Since there are no graves at Salem that seem out of place, it is likely that the new plat followed at least partly an earlier one.
Salem remained an active Methodist congregation until the 1930s and its members administered and maintained the cemetery during those years.
The Methodist congregation had faded by the 1940s, however, and the church was closed for a time. It was reopened by community residents during the 1940s, but took a Baptist turn and declined to accept Methodist preachers. As a result, the Iowa Methodist Conference during 1947 sold the church and church grounds to what became known as the Salem Community Church. The cemetery was deeded to the Benton Township trustees who assumed responsibility for its care.
Salem Community Church remained active well into the 1970s, but declining rural population and the deaths of key members caused it to close during that decade. A decision was made to demolish the church building, still well-maintained and structurally sound, and the church grounds, which had begun to be used for cemetery purposes as the original cemetery filled, also were deeded to the Benton Township trustees. Today, only the church’s front step remains.
That left the cemetery in the form it now has. Upon the death of Burdette Smith, his family placed new fencing (replacing hitching posts that had rotted), brick gateposts and a plaque identifying Salem at the front. Some years later, hard-maple trees were planted in memory of Reefa (Miller) Myers to replace giant soft-maples that had died.
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