Neither Lyn nor Keith Boone expected to find love while donating blood at Indiana University, but as fate would have it, that is how the two first met.
“She looked pale after donating and I offered to walk her back to the dorm,” Keith said, grinning ear to ear while recalling the first time they met. They married in 1972 in the student union in Bloomington, where it all started.
The Boones moved from Indiana to Atlanta, Georgia, then made their way north to Ohio, first settling in Oberlin before moving to Granville to work at Denison University. Lyn, then the senior development officer, and Keith, associate provost, retired in 2010.
Over the last 30 years in Granville, the Boones have dedicated their lives to giving back to the community, volunteering at the Granville Historical Society and serving as members of the Licking Land Trust board. Most notably, the Boones are members of the Granville Union Cemetery Board, and have led the charge in maintaining and restoring the Old Colony Burying Ground cemetery on South Main Street.
The first burial at the Old Colony Burying Ground dates back to 1806, meaning some of the stones in the cemetery represent the village’s original residents who made their way to Ohio from Granville, Massachusetts.
The cemetery became the final resting place for many revolutionary soldiers from all over the United States as well as one Canadian soldier, identified by the Canadian flag that is flying next to his gravestone.
The War of 1812 caused the cemetery to grow, eventually preventing the site from accepting additional burials, except for town paupers who were laid to rest there in the years following.
Sandstone was the norm for the headstones in the cemetery, making repairs on the stones all the more difficult. The stones were switched to marble in the early 1930s.
In 1992, the Boones’ predecessors – Florence Hoffman and Carl Frazier – began restoring the burial ground. And thanks to Charles Webster Bryant, the Granville Historical Society has a clear blueprint of burial locations and inscriptions for the cemetery.
The cemetery is like “an outdoor museum of Granville’s history,” Lyn said in June at an event in the cemetery hosted by the Hocking Valley Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR).
Lyn is the historian, the archivist and the keeper of history. She spends hours meticulously finding information on each stone as well as hosting community cleanup events to get people involved with their work.
“Every stone has a story,” has become her catchphrase, and she and Keith hold that ideal up every day.
And over the past decade, Lyn has helped locate and verify all the known patriots’ graves in the cemetery – a task that earned her the Martha Washington medal and certificate in recognition of outstanding service to the SAR.
“Nothing contributes more to the hallowed historic aura than the knowledge that this is the final resting place of the 23 veterans who came here in the early 19th century,” she said in June.
Keith is the repairman, the preservationist and the maintenance crew. Scrubbing, gluing and preserving is his forte.
His dedication to the art of preserving is unmatched. One winter he found particular fondness of a small stone that honored a child named Sarah True. He took this stone home with him and repaired it until it was practically new.
“Her mother would be thanking you,” Lyn said to Keith.
Read more: Volunteers give Old Colony Burying Ground a facelift during an annual cleanup
The two have no plan to be stopping anytime soon, nor do they see an end to the restoration work. They explained it is a continuous project that will always need to be cleaned, restored and taken care of. Due to the thawing and freezing of the ground from weather, the stones continue to move and fall, leaving new work for volunteers after every season.
“We would not have much of the history of Granville recorded without their volunteer hours, work and passion,” said nominator Bryn Bird, a Granville Township trustee and member of the Granville Union Cemetery Board alongside the Boones. “Their work is critically important to the future of the community.”
Ellen Hansen writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.