“Sacred to the memory of Sarah Smith, wife of Asa Smith Esqr.; who departed this life Sept. 29th 1829. Aged 65 years.”
Workers doing landscaping and painting at Denison University turned over what they thought was just an irregular paving slab, part of a patio near a stone house on the north edge of the campus this spring. What they uncovered is a page out of Ohio’s history.
Our 40th governor of the state of Ohio, Asa Smith Bushnell, served from 1896 to 1900. He was born in Rome, New York in 1834 to Daniel and Harriet Smith Bushnell, and his mother’s parents were Asa Smith, for whom he’s obviously named, and his wife Sarah, who is said in online resources to be born “about” 1779 in Connecticut.
Gov. Bushnell was buried in Springfield, Ohio at Ferncliff Cemetery following his death in Columbus in 1904, as are his wife and children in an ornate family mausoleum; his parents died in the early 1880s and are buried in Cincinnati’s renowned Spring Grove Cemetery.
But the grandparents on his mother’s side we can be less sure about, while their names and likely dates line up well for this mysterious stone marker found by the Bancroft House. Yet an Asa Smith is not recorded as buried in Granville Township. Sarah Smith, though? Someone by that name seems to be somewhere nearby.
The cemetery records for Maple Grove Cemetery in Granville include a number of committals whose death dates far precede the establishment of that graveyard in the 1840s, when the Old Colony Burying Ground on South Main Street began to fill up the space allowed for it since its establishment in 1806. Intriguingly, there are a Sally Smith and a Sarah Smith listed for Maple Grove, both with birth dates indicating that these deaths in 1822 and 1823 are of very young children. A reburial from a family plot in the township, relocated later to Maple Grove, would make sense, and these two children could have been at least related to Asa and Sarah, though surely not their own if she died in 1829 at the age of 65. Was there a family of Smiths on that property before the Bancroft House, and some or all of them moved to Maple Grove after the land changed hands?
The stone Bancroft House at 555 North Pearl Street has been part of the Denison campus since Edward Deeds bought the northern reaches of today’s campus in 1917 for the college; reputed to have been part of the Underground Railroad, we know for certain that two years after it was built in 1834, the property and barn once behind the home were used for a notable state convention for the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society.
Read more: Namesake of Denison’s Bancroft House was a prominent Granville abolitionist
The gravestone, though, is dated to five years BEFORE the date of construction for the Bancroft House. It makes sense to suppose that after Sarah’s death, Asa Smith moved on, selling the land to the Bancroft family, who built the home we see today. Asa Smith is not listed for either Spring Grove in Cincinnati or Ferncliff in Springfield, and his fate is a mystery.
If the Sarah Smith of our marker was the mother of Gov. Asa Smith Bushnell’s mother Harriet Smith Bushnell, born in 1806 in Connecticut, she would have been 42, which is just plausible. The fact that her husband was clearly an Asa Smith ties that link more tightly.
Obviously, the 40th governor’s grandmother being born “about” 1779 fits less well, since that would put her at age 50, not 65 in 1829, yet there is the obvious qualifier of “about” leaving us some wiggle room.
Perhaps more to the point: as the workers were asking the morning they turned the slab over, is this woman still buried here, or nearby?
The only answer we have is “no one knows.” What fits the scraps of data we have is that the Smith family sold their land to the Bancroft family in 1834, who then built a stone house where perhaps a rougher log or wooden home once stood, and in subsequent years it seems a few Smith family burials were moved to Maple Grove, including the infants Sally and Sarah.
Was the older Sarah Smith moved, too? She may have been, and the stone left behind; we have other stories of migrating gravestones from the late 1800s and early 1900s for burials in Granville, such as Lillie Jones’s marker, one of which is still on the porch of the Granville Historical Society.
Or perhaps more likely is that by the time the Bancrofts came, and before the relocation effort took shape with the establishment of the then-newer Maple Grove in the 1840s, Sarah Smith’s marker had toppled over, covered with leaves and soil, and the burial site forgotten. She may well rest somewhere in that lawn sloping up from the 1834 house, east of the Mitchell Center, in a location as yet undetermined.
All we know for certain is what’s carved in stone, and leaning against the Bancroft House, waiting for someone to make the right connections. And she might well be the grandmother of an Ohio governor, buried on the Denison campus.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio.