This is Part III of a three-part series. Part I was published on Wednesday. Part II was published on Thursday.
MOUNT VERNON — In late April 2022, Jo Ann Schedler, a Native American elder, visited Mount Vernon. She went to Moundview Cemetery, scattered some tobacco, and said a prayer for a deceased relative.
She was a long way from home.
Schedler is a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians. Members of that community call themselves the muh-he-cannock, the “People of the Waters that are Never Still” and originated as a branch of the Mohican tribe who converted to Christianity and congregated around the “praying town” of Stockbridge, Massachusetts in the 1730s.
During the American Revolution, they allied with the Americans, but their service did not prevent them from being ousted from their homes in the mid-1780s. They found temporary refuge with Oneida relatives in upstate New York, but they faced pressure there as well.
Eventually, the Stockbridges were forced to relocate to a reservation in Shawano County, Wisconsin where their tribal headquarters — and most of their population — remains today.
She and her husband had come to Ohio to attend a presentation at the Licking County Public Library about the murder of Rachel Konkapot near Utica in 1819. During the Q&A session that followed, she introduced herself to the audience and announced that, as a member of the Stockbridge Tribe’s Historical Affairs Committee and a descendant of the Konkapot family, she wanted to place a modest tombstone at her grave.
Then things got complicated.
Identifying Rachel’s original grave site was not a problem. Several sources indicate that she was buried in the old Mount Vernon city cemetery — which once sat beside the First Presbyterian Church at the corner of Chestnut and Gay Streets.
Today, a building shared by the Knox County Board of Elections and the Veterans Services Office stands in its place. Mount Vernon’s earliest residents were buried there prior to the opening of Moundview Cemetery in the 1830s and for more than a decade after.
Even though few records survive from the old city cemetery, we know that Rachel was buried in the northeast corner of the graveyard — probably near where the ballot drop-off box stands today.
But local lore — as related to us by several individuals, including a historian at the First Presbyterian Church and by the Director of the Knox County Historical Society — suggests that the bodies were exhumed from that site and transferred to Moundview Cemetery in 1851 … or maybe in 1855 … or perhaps at some other point in the 1850s.
We were even told exactly where in the “new” cemetery the graves were relocated: the southwest addition near Warden Street.
That is why Jo Ann Schedler sprinkled tobacco at that site before returning to Wisconsin. Moundview Cemetery officials, however, disagree with those oral accounts. There is a sizable parcel of land in the southwest addition without marked burials but they believe — perhaps with some validity — that the tracts remain empty because that was where the old cemetery office stood before it burned down.
Unfortunately, though, while their record-keeping has improved immensely in recent decades, many gaps remain from earlier days. When officials helped us search for documentation of that building’s placement — and the year (or even the decade) — that it burned, we came up empty-handed.
They had a photograph of the cemetery office that preceded the current one at the Wooster Road entrance — but it was undated and may not even be the building for which we were looking. And their records were not clear on why nothing had since been done to make those plots usable. So our visit raised more questions than it answered.
In any case, the cemetery cannot let anyone erect a headstone to someone without at least some proof that they were actually buried there and marking a grave on public land that is no longer an actual graveyard is not a straightforward process.
This brings us to the key purpose in writing this series of articles for Knox Pages.
We need your help.
When we undertook this project, we began gathering and examining documents surrounding the murder of Rachel Konkapot, the life of her daughter and her eventual reunion with the Stockbridge community, and the biographies of many of the individuals associated with them.
We worked on it for nearly three years so far … and hope soon to publish something much more substantial than we were able to offer here. Many people have helped us along the way and even those with little information to offer were nearly always generous with their time and encouraged our efforts.
But not everything historical makes it into readily available documents.
So, we are asking community members for ANY information they might know about Rachel Konkapot’s murder near Utica, about the African-American family that adopted Mary Konkapot, and about what happened to the bodies of those buried in the Old City Cemetery. Family stories, local lore, old newspaper clippings, letters, anything that will help flesh out these stories more completely would be greatly appreciated.
We always intended to present everything we accumulate and produce to both the local historical society and to the Stockbridge community’s tribal archiv . While we had not expected to make a public appeal for more information, there seems no reason why anything gathered in this manner should not also be part of that and become sources for anyone wanting to learn more about these topics.
Community histories should involve their communities.
So, if you have any information or know someone that you think we should talk to or interview, please send us a message at heidi.historyknox@gmail.com.
When Jo Ann Schedler honored us by requesting that we help her commemorate her relative with a tombstone, our project transformed from a hobby to something more like a duty. More than 200 years ago, a tragedy occurred in Knox County that bound our community to hers.
Insofar as they were able, our predecessors in this community did what they could to help. Today, we have an opportunity to do so again.
Hopefully, we will measure up.
