GREER — Long ago, it was the place where teenage boys would bring their dates after high school sock hops or football games. They would park their Studebakers at the intersection of two lonely country roads outside Greer, under the pale light of the moon.
As the Mohican River rippled softly in the night, the young men would tell their girls that this forgotten place was the location of Sarah’s grave, a place haunted by a long-dead witch. With any luck, the girl would get a chill and snuggle a little closer to her guy. He no doubt hoped she wouldn’t notice his smirk.
That was the gist of the story when I talked about it with David Greer, a descendent of the founders of the village of Greer in eastern Knox County, years ago for a Mount Vernon News story on the legend.
Greer said that the version of the story he heard as a youth was that Sarah was supposedly a witch decapitated by her jealous husband, who then buried her beside the road near their house, without her head. The ghost story claimed that Sarah still walked Alum Rock Road looking for her head.
Numerous, sometimes baroque versions of the tale are still floating around out there, some centered on the abandoned building that no longer stands near the intersection. Another version of the legend had it that Sarah was a girl who died in a house fire and was buried there.
Where is there?
You’d never notice it as a place at all, today. If you drive out of Greer on Brinkhaven Road, on the eastern side of the Mohican River, you will first go south (and keep your eyes open for possible bald eagle sightings along the river, just for fun), then turn east across the fields, following the general course of the river. Brinkhaven Road turns south and crosses a bridge over the river. But if you continue straight onto a smaller road instead of turning south, you are on Alum Rock Road.
Just over the Holmes County line, there is an intersection with another road. The intersecting road is Richland Township Road 16, and the one that continues along the low ground is Township Road 17.
My guess would be that Township Road 16 is the actual Alum Rock Road, as it abruptly climbs steeply up onto Kaylor Ridge, passing many outcroppings of rock along the way that would have been mined for alum by early settlers. Township Road 17, the low road, was once known as Old Mill Road, evidently from the sawmill that once stood there, according to an 1875 map.
But there’s not much to notice about the intersection, except that between the intersection and the Mohican River, there is a small patch of overgrown land with an old evergreen among the trees.
But that’s an odd detail. Evergreens don’t tend to pop up by themselves in the woods of Appalachia — which Holmes County officially is part of — unless they are planted there. Yet, why on earth would someone plant an evergreen here? The reason is that it was the kind of place where evergreens might be planted as symbols: “ever green,” as in, “always living,” or at least waiting for resurrection.
Once, long, long ago, it was a cemetery. It was so long ago that it isn’t even marked on the 1875 Holmes County atlas, suggesting it had already been largely forgotten by then.
Dr. Joseph Poole, who owned a cabin nearby, told me that when he bought his property in the 1960s, the previous owners told him that the patch of land between the river and the road had been a pioneer cemetery where both settlers and American Indians were buried.
The settlers of the rugged area were families from the Alsace-Lorraine region along the border of France and Germany. They buried some of their people in this valley cemetery, but also in the graveyard attached to the St. Joseph Mission, Father Jean Baptiste Lamy’s project up on Kaylor Ridge, overlooking the valley, which we have discussed before in these columns.
The Civil War’s infamous “Fort Fizzle” is just a few miles away from here, too. It’s an area where the past doesn’t seem that far away.
Who, then, was Sarah?
I finally found what may be the nugget of truth from which the legend grew when I talked to Brad Kaylor of Danville, a descendent of the family whose name is on the overlooking ridge. Kaylor said that the story had been passed down through his family that Sarah was a woman who was traveling aboard a covered wagon headed west. Illness struck the family, and Sarah died.
The family had no intention of settling in the gnarled hills of Holmes and Knox Counties, so they did the only thing they could: They buried Sarah aside the road, on a bluff overlooking the Mohican River. And then they continued on, never to return. Other bodies were planted there in the early years of settlement, and someone was even thoughtful enough to plant that evergreen to symbolize the continuation of life in heaven.
But the cemetery’s earthly existence was sad. No longer used, the cemetery was eventually forgotten. The few headstones there were vandalized by teenagers trying to foolishly demonstrate their lack of fear of death by killing the memory of those gone long before them.
Dr. Poole recalled the last of the cemetery’s headstones being chucked over the bluff into the river by vandals decades ago. He thought that the last stone to go had the name “Shuman” or something like that carved on it. Unless it has been preserved in the mud at the base of the cliff, we’ll never know.
In the end, Sarah’s grave proved to be a real place holding a real fragment of human memory, almost obliterated by exaggeration and mischief. But the veil is thin this time of year. Let’s hope that Sarah’s shade hears us remember her and her tragic passing, and that she forgives those who forgot her.
