Part I: The Battle for the Body

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a two-part series. Part II will be published on Oct. 25, 2025.

LIBERTY TOWNSHIP — Several years back, when I worked in the mines at the Mount Vernon News, my colleague Kimberly Orsborn and I decided to have a little historical fun.

We called up our friends Janet Wacker and Robia Kaylor, and headed out to Bangs to look at the old county infirmary, which was still there in those days.

Afterwards, we extended our adventure by checking out Bird Cemetery, just off U.S. 36/Ohio 3 about a mile west of Bangs. We appreciated the berry vines growing in the cemetery, leftover from the days when people used to picnic in such places.

Hey, don’t knock it; the entertainment options were limited back then. I’d have to say I’d still find picking raspberries in a boneyard more entertaining than a lot of current television shows!

As we explored the site, we were also amused by the vintage outhouse, replete with graffiti, that was slowly sliding down the hill behind the cemetery. I don’t think it was there anymore the last time I checked.

But one thing that particularly struck me that day, and every time I’ve driven by ever since, was the access road, named appropriately enough, “Bird Cemetery Road,” because it seemed nothing more than a side loop from the highway, starting at the base of the hill, arching up to the cemetery gate, then sinking back down to the paved road.

As it turns out, my excuse for digging into the road’s history was yet to come.

As longtime readers know, sometimes I go searching for stories, and other times I seem to stumble across them.

Last week, I opened an online archive of old newspapers in hopes of finding something a little dark and offbeat for the Halloween season, and stumbled across a pair of stories, one of which was from October of 1881.

The other story was of uncertain date, and I only heard about it because it was referenced by the first story. By the time I dove in, I discovered the pair of stories was going to call for a lot more work than I first figured.

In the end, I had to get my shoes on the ground and eyes on the horizon to untangle a surreal, bordering on comical battle over a dead body, as well as an even darker tragedy from around 200 years ago, involving a long-forgotten fatal crash.

By the time I teased it all out, it grew so large, we’re going to have to split this into two parts.

Suiting the uncanny mix of moods in these stories, it all starts with a circus. So, here we go. Hang on to your bones.

One of the popular modern moans is that people aren’t as nice as they used to be. The 1881 story of the sad fate of Frederick Iunger in Liberty Township proves the past could be as cruel as any hard-hearted person today.

The man’s bones proved far more valuable than his life.

It’s ironic that a column earlier this month discussed the visit of a circus to Mount Vernon, as this week’s references another circus in passing.

In October of 1881, the visiting show was the Sells Brothers Circus of Columbus, Ohio, which stopped in Mount Vernon either on its way out or back in from a national tour.

While the circus has nothing to do directly with this story, it is the reason that many people had a chance to observe a developing situation.

With the circus at the county seat, families were streaming in from all over Knox County to attend.

Many people traveled up the Columbus Road (later known as the Three-C Highway [as in Cleveland / Columbus / Cincinnati] and today known as U.S. 36/Ohio 3) toward town, passing through Bangs and Mount Liberty on their way.

Almost all these people who passed saw a rough-looking man who had lain down aside the road in Liberty Township. Determining the exact location of this incident is a little tricky.

The report in the Democratic Banner describes it as, “at a point about six miles from here, or to be more explicit, near the knoll or hill overlooking Dry Creek [….]”

The problem with this description is that Dry Creek roughly parallels Ohio 3 from Thayer Road to Gilbert Road, which is quite a large area. The six-mile description ought to place it somewhere between Mount Liberty and Bangs.

The paper further specifies the spot by describing it as “where tradition says in the early history of the county a stage coach went over the steep declivity, resulting in the killing of the occupants.”

This may have helped readers in 1881, but this stagecoach crash was one I’ve never previously encountered, so it doesn’t help today’s readers.

I wondered at first if it could refer to the hill just before you get to Mount Liberty, if you are heading south down the road. This would be a little further than six miles from downtown Mount Vernon, but there is a steep bank between the road and creek there.

On the other hand, the newspaper would almost certainly have referred to the spot as “just outside Mount Liberty” if that were the place.

The hill before getting to Bangs doesn’t quite work, either, as Dry Creek is well back from the road there, and there is nothing one could describe as a “steep declivity.”

I finally decided to drive the route and see exactly where six miles would put me. I started on the square, where the Banner’s offices were once located, and drove out Columbus Road and onto U.S. 36. I passed Bangs with a little distance to go.

Just as my speedometer marked off six miles, I rounded the curve at Bird Cemetery, and found myself looking up that access road, which goes up onto a little knoll, with a steep declivity to the left.

I wondered for a moment why, if this was the location, the Banner didn’t simply identify it as Bird Cemetery Hill.

But that reflects my thinking about the site today. In modern times, the cemetery stretches all the way down the large hill to little knoll at the end, but that would not have always been the case.

Though the 1871 marks the cemetery as already being in place, it also shows it as a very small spot. When the newspaper was reporting, the cemetery would still have been a tiny site atop the hill, some distance away.

The knoll that I think the newspaper report was referencing is indeed an outcropping lower down the hill, and the road went over the knoll, not the full hill above. With that thought, I felt that everything fell into place.

There’s little question that a stagecoach coming up onto this knoll with a 20-foot drop-off would have been in trouble if it was going fast and lost control.

Could it have been ice on the road on a frosty night? Or perhaps more likely, mud?

It could even have been a pothole breaking a stagecoach wheel, or the same hazard we encounter today: deer running out in front of a vehicle.

Whatever the case, the vague newspaper reference suggests that at some point in the early years of the county, but after this road was built, which suggests to me a date of 1815 to 1835, a stagecoach crashed here, going over this steep embankment, which would certainly be enough of a disastrous crash to kill everyone on board.

Has anyone else ever heard of this incident?

I wish I could find more, but A. Banning Norton’s 1862 History of Knox County says nothing about this supposedly well-known event.

But with the scant information I have, combined with actually driving the cited distance, I’m inclined to say this looks like exactly the kind of spot where such an accident could have occurred, with nothing else along this highway standing out as a better candidate.

Was this the original road?

This was where I had to combine research with legwork.

Both the 1871 and 1896 county atlases show a peculiar feature here: The road originally crossed over the railroad tracks (today the Heart of Ohio trail), then turned at a ninety-degree angle and immediately crossed back over the tracks and headed up past Bird Cemetery.

As I examined the site early one frosty morning, I checked for traffic, then made my way across U.S. 36, keeping on a more-or-less straight line from the cemetery road.

I crossed the paved path marking the original railroad bed, and looked into the trees between the path and Dry Creek.

What I found at the end of that straight line was a decrepit old bridge over the creek just beyond the point where the original road crossed the railroad.

The current bridge wasn’t as old as the original road path, but the extremely old fieldstones piled up around its foundations showed that a much older bridge once sat there, providing access from the road into the field beyond.

I couldn’t find any sign of the original road bed in the stretch between Bird Cemetery Road and the bridge, because the ground has been extensively worked over.

But when I looked at the other angle from the bridge, sure enough, I could just make out the old roadway in the trees, pointing in a straight line from the bridge to the modern roadway east of the curve.

Where the road once had a dangerous double crossing of the railroad in order to get to the bridge, the highway was later smoothed out to avoid such an awkward pair of crossings.

In the process, it looks like the engineers also took the road off the hill leading up to Bird Cemetery, and put it down at the bottom of the hill, removing the chance of later wrecks over that “steep declivity.”

An original stretch of the gravel road was left as Bird Cemetery Road. Now the site of this long-forgotten disaster can be remembered in honor of the travelers who met the end of their roads on this treacherous stretch of road.

But wherever the stagecoach accident spot was, nearly the same spot of cursed road was to launch another tragic story many years later, which we will return to next week: The posthumous misadventures of Frederick Iunger.