Ohio Graves of the Standifords and Woodards

 

 

Morris Chapel Cemetery today

 

Last week Jim and I took a road trip to southern Ohio to see a few museums and underground railroad sites we’d read about, and on the third day we took some time to look for the graves of Grandpa Standiford’s (and our) ancestors in and around Nelsonville, in the southeast corner of the state. As you know, Grandpa was born in Nelsonville in 1909, the third of four children born to Edward William & Winifred “Winnie” Belle (Woodard) Standiford. His parents had married on Christmas Day 1900, and welcomed their first child, Donald Vincent Standiford, 11 months later. Their second child, Anna Ruth Standiford, was born in May 1904, and Winnie reportedly doted over her. Tragically, on December 17, 1908, Anna Ruth died of scarlet fever, and the 4-year-old was laid to rest under a heart-shaped headstone in Nelsonville’s Greenlawn Cemetery.

 

Grave of Anna Ruth Standiford

 

Greenlawn Cemetery is also the final resting place of Vincent Taylor Standiford, Edward’s father, and Vincent’s second wife, Ida F. Collins. (Edward’s mother, Frances C. (Morgan) Standiford, died in 1880 and was buried in West Virginia.) Vincent and Ida’s graves are in the row just ahead of Ruth’s.

 

 

   

Graves of Vincent Taylor & Ida F. (Collins) Standiford

 

Grandpa was born in Nelsonville on August 22, 1909, eight months after Ruth’s death. According to mom, Winnie was still consumed by grief and was emotionally distant from her two sons. Around 1911, the Standifords moved to Van Wert, Ohio, in the opposite corner of the state. It was here that their final child was born—Marian M. Standiford. It is unclear, but Marian appears to have suffered from cerebral palsy or autism, and would live with her parents all her life. (The Standifords left Ohio for Phoenix around 1925 or 1926, shortly after Grandpa graduated from high school.)

 

 

Ichabod & Sarah (Bennett) Woodard

 

The Woodard family was more firmly grounded in Ohio than the Standifords, having arrived in 1812. According to The History of Hocking Valley, Ohio, Together with Sketches of Its Cities, Villages, and Townships, Educational, Religious, Civil, Military, and Political History, Portraits of Prominent Persons, and Biographies of Representative Citizens (1883):

 

Ichabod Woodard Sr., [our 4th great-grandfather], was born in Essex County, New Jersey, October 12, 1782, and was a son of William Woodard, a Revolutionary soldier who lost his life in that great struggle for liberty. [More on him in a later post.] At the age of twenty years our subject went to New York State, and ran rafts of logs to Philadelphia. He afterward owned a mill on the Delaware River, which was destroyed by a freshet [spring flood].

             Then, in 1812, he placed his wife and children and effects in a one-horse wagon and came to Zanesville, Ohio, where he stopped to rest a day or two, turning his horse into a pasture field. There was one tree (or stub) in the field, and when the horse was grazing nearby it fell on him, killing him instantly. Mr. Woodard was completely broken down by this misfortune, for he was left with a family, a wagon, and only $6 in money. He traded his wagon for a horse, and managed to get his family to Fairfield County in the fall of 1813. He there engaged in farming until 1824, when he removed to McArthur, in what is now Vinton County, Ohio. In February 1825, he removed to the old Woodard homestead, in Starr Township, on section 15. The house he had built there in the fall of 1824 is still standing, and is occupied by his grandson, Webster Woodard.

             [Ichabod Woodard] was married December 16, 1801, to Sarah Bennett [our 4th great-grandmother]. She was born on Long Island in 1785, on a place given to her mother, Mary Beers [5th GG], by Mrs. Woodard’s Grandfather Beers. It is situated where a part of Brooklyn now stands. The deed was lost and other parties unjustly own the land.

             Mr. and Mrs. Woodard were the parents of twelve children, eight now living—Martha, Nancy, David and William (twins), Nathan B., James G., Ephraim, and Isaac. Mr. Woodard was for many years a Methodist, and was the father of the class at Woodard’s (now called Morris) Chapel. His house was for many years the home of the itinerant minister.

             On June 2, 1868, [85-year-old Ichabod Woodard] read a few chapters as usual in the Bible, laid in a chair near the bed, and expired in a few minutes.

 

Grave marker of Ichabod & Sarah (Bennett) Woodard

 

Ichabod Woodard was buried in the Morris Chapel Cemetery, accessed through a pasture on Sanner Road northwest of Nelsonville. Sarah (Bennett) Woodard died the following year on November 14, 1869, age 84. They are buried together beneath an obelisk that is slowly being crushed by a nearby tree—ironic given their family history. The cemetery’s namesake, Morris Chapel, appears to be long gone.

 

William Cooper Woodard, their son and our 3rd great-grandfather, was born in New York on February 20, 1808, four years before the Woodard family left for Ohio. He married Mary Sara Hobson, our 3rd great-grandmother, in Hocking County on November 13, 1833. He was 25 and she was 23. They had nine children, all of whom lived to adulthood. Their sixth child, William Arnold Woodard, is our 2nd great grandfather, born here on April 19, 1848.

 

William Cooper & Mary Sara (Hobson) Woodard are buried a few miles west of his parents in the Asbury Methodist Church Cemetery. Mary died in 1875 (age 65) and William in 1885 (77). The Asbury Methodist Church still stands, and appears to be open for business.

 

     

Grave marker of William Cooper & Mary Sara (Hobson) Woodard and the Asbury Methodist Church

 

The Asbury Methodist Church Cemetery is also the final resting place of Martha (Wolters) Wilson, our 3rd great-grandmother. She is the mother of Sarah Anna Wilson, who married William Arnold Woodard, the parents of Grandpa’s mother Winnie. Martha Wolters was born in Virginia (probably West Virginia today) in 1822, married Hiram Hinkle Wilson in 1845, had nine children, and died in 1868 at the relatively young age of 45.

 

Grave marker of Martha (Wolters) Wilson

 

Less than a year after Martha died, Hiram Hinkle Wilson, our 3rd great-grandfather, married Civil War widow Elizabeth Thompson. In 1873, shortly after giving birth to the couple’s only child, Henry William Wilson, she also died. And so, before the year was up, Hiram Hinkle Wilson married a third time, again to a Civil War widow: Alice “Allie” Thompson . . . sister of Elizabeth. (Are you keeping this straight?) When he died in 1876, Hiram Hinkle Wilson was buried in the Mount Zion Cemetery, a few miles from his first wife’s resting place, but not with either of his other two wives.

 

Grave marker of Hiram Hinkle Wilson

 

Finally, twelve miles southeast of Nelsonville, we visited the Woodard family plot in Athens.

 

The Woodards

Front (l to r): Mother Sarah Anna, son James, and father William Arnold

Back (l ot r): Daughters Winnie, Etta, Ida, Eva, and Allie

 

William Arnold & Sarah Anna (Wilson) Woodard, our 2nd great grandparents, married in 1868 and had six children: Mary Evaline “Eva” (1869), James W. (1872), Janett Alice “Allie” (1875), Lauretta “Etta” (1878), Winifred “Winnie” Belle (1881), and Ida Mae (1884). When they lived in Nelsonville—in the home next to the Standifords according to the 1910 Census—William worked as a coal miner. He did not retire until he was well into his 60s.

 

The Woodard plot in the West Union Street Cemetery in Athens is James W. Woodard’s family plot. He was a salesman and grocer in the Athens area starting in his 20s. He married twice, had six children, and died in the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918. He was 46. Both William Arnold & Sarah Anna (Wilson) Woodard, who died after James—Sarah in 1920 and William in 1926—are buried with him.