Written in stone – Families highlighted at Oakwood Cemetery tour
HERMITAGE – Shenango Valley residents may recognize the names Budd, Buhl, Forker, McDowell and Fruit as local landmarks or street names.
Those places are the names of families who built the area into what it is today. The families were laid to rest in a cemetery nestled at the end of Sharon’s North Oakland Avenue in what is now Hermitage.
The Sharon Historical Society will highlight those families as part of its Oakwood Cemetery History Walk with two identical tours on Saturday as part of Oakwood’s 150th Anniversary celebration.
”Many of the pioneers and the forefathers of the valley are laid to rest there,” said Brian Kepple of Sharon Historical Society.
“I think it is going to be very interesting,” said Greg DelMonaco, Oakwood’s manager. “It’s got a lot of nice information about people interred there. There are so many founders of this cemetery here. A lot who were instrumental in making the Sharon area what it is.”
There are nine focal points on the tour, which is expected to last just over two hours, each with its own speaker.
“The speakers themselves have done a great job,” Kepple said. “Each has done the research on their own topic.”
The tour stops include:
• The Buhl chapel, built in the 1890s, which holds the crypts of industrialist and philanthropist Frank Buhl and his wife, Julia Forker Buhl.
• Billy Whitla, the nephew of Mrs. Buhl who gained national attention when he was kidnapped and ransomed at age 8 in 1909.
• The plots of prominent pioneers including the Curtis, Perkins, Porter, McCleery and Irvine families.
• The famous gypsy queen, Lena Miller, whose funeral drew 5,000 people to the cemetery in 1921 after she died while visiting Sharon with a carnival.
• Sebastian Runser, who immigrated from France in 1832 as a child and built a life as a tradesman and in managing iron and boiler works, even patenting some boiler inventions.
• A section of graves where an entire cemetery at West State Street and Logan Avenue was relocated in the 1870s after Sharon outlawed cemeteries within its limits.
• Family mausoleums, including an opportunity to step inside the Yaeger-Neff mausoleum.
• A talk about the thousands of veterans buried in Oakwood, including a Civil War confederate soldier.
• The massive monument to Peter L. Kimberly, a capitalist and industrialist who often partnered with Frank Buhl and whose estate made numerous local charitable gifts after his death in 1905.
”It’s been a big undertaking,” Kepple said. “Researching the history, parking, and everything.”
DelMonaco has fielded several calls of interest in the past week about the tour, and expects between 400 and 500 people to walk through the cemetery on Saturday.
More than 27,000 people have been buried in Oakwood, including at least 1,800 veterans, DelMonaco said.
”A lot of people entrusted us to do good for them,” DelMonaco said. “It’s a nice place to walk through. It’s like a parklike atmosphere.”