Located within a small business district at 3451 Lee Road, Warrensville West Cemetery offers a reminder of the individuals and communities that inhabited the area prior to the development of Shaker Heights. The headstones and markers adorning the small graveyard speak of an unfamiliar landscape, lost to time, that was the home of brave pioneer families and their descendants, immigrant settlers, and the North Union Shakers. Listed as a landmark on August 24, 1976, these symbolic grounds are among the oldest designated landmarks in Shaker Heights, and provide a fitting place of remembrance for Warrensville Township's earliest residents.
The history of the cemetery can be traced back to the first settlers, and namesakes, of Warrensville Township. Daniel and Margaret Prentiss Warren emigrated to the Western Reserve from Acworth, New Hampshire in 1808 with their infant son. Working as a brick-maker, Daniel earned rights to a $300 parcel of land for his work in the construction of the Court House in Jefferson, Ohio. Choosing a lot based on its vicinity to Moses Cleveland's settlement, the Warrens built a log cabin in 1809 and cleared land for crops in the heavily wooded forest. The Warrens then began to raise a family in the rugged environment, and were soon joined by relatives in what was eventually named Warrensville Township.
In 1811, the couple's two year old daughter, Lovisa, died. She was buried on a ridge at the edge of their property. When this land was purchased by Asa Stiles in 1812, the grounds were transferred to the township for use as a cemetery. The burial ground would continue to be used by the Warren family, as well as other early settlers of Warrensville Township. Similar to community burial grounds formed in other inhospitable areas of Cuyahoga County, the cemetery was small, rustic, and unadorned. With roads and trails that proved to be unsuitable for travel much of the year, no nearby church, and living conditions that tended to promote their frequent usage, the centralized burial grounds soon became a repository of the township's pioneer settlers and their descendants.
As Warrensville attracted new residents, the cemetery began to reflect the changing face of the surrounding community. In 1826, three families that had recently emigrated from the Isle of Man arrived in Cleveland. Within a year, more than 200 Manx residents had settled in the Newburgh and Warrensville area. As word spread that Warrensville was a desirable location for farming, the township quickly became the center of the region's Manx population. Often characterized as deeply religious, hard-working and clannish, many of the pioneers of Warrensville's Manx settlement purchased lots in the austere graveyard. A demographic shift within the cemetery resulted from the combined influence of this growing immigrant population, changes in popular taste of burial grounds, and improved routes of transportation into and out of the township. By the early 1900s, vver half the graveyard's population were Manxmen.
The community burial grounds became host to a new group of Warrensville settlers at the turn of the 20th century. A 40-foot lot was purchased by the City of Shaker Heights to re-inter bodies from the North Union Shaker cemetery. Located on land that was to be developed as a residential neighborhood, the Van Sweringen Company received permission from the Shaker Society in Union Village, Ohio, to relocate the bodies of the 138 members of the communal society to Warrensville West Cemetery. The remains of eighty-nine Shakers were located, placed in coffins, and buried in a common grave. The site would not be marked until 1949, when the Shaker Historical Society placed a granite boulder from an old Shaker farm above the grave.
While the cemetery markers reflect the history of Warrensville's founders, Manxmen and Shakers, they also offers clues to the lives led by those interred. The many children and infants buried in the graveyard are a reminder of the harsh living conditions endured by Warrensville's earliest resident. Engravings on headstones identify the veterans of five wars. Of these veterans, four served in the American Revolution, two in the War of 1812, one in the Mexican-American War, fourteen in the Civil War, and one in World War II. Familial relationships, birthplaces, and occupations are also memorialized. Although most markers have been weathered to the point of ineligibility, the grave of Mary Brogden -who died in 1843 - even offers visitors to the burial grounds advice:
"Friends as you pass me by, As you are now, So once was I. As I am now, So all must be. Prepare for death, And follow me."
]]>In the late 1950s, the Shaker Historical Society undertook the daunting task of creating a memorial marker to tell the story of a small unmarked burial ground commonly referred to as the "Lee Road Cemetery" or the "Old Manx Cemetery." This graveyard, located at 3451 Lee Road, was the second oldest burial ground in Cuyahoga County, and the oldest designated landmark in Shaker Heights. Records for the cemetery, however, had long been lost, and only a few burials had taken place in the previous half-century. The Shaker Historical Society would need to interpret a story for the space through a study of grave inscriptions, newspaper articles, county histories, maps, and accounts provided by descendants of those buried. The narrative of the recovered history was framed to tell the tale of Shaker Heights's common heritage and be a celebration of the region's pioneer past.
The memorial marker was to inscribe new meaning into the public burial grounds. The Shaker Historical Society intended to transform the unmarked and deserted graveyard into a shrine, and a space where residents of Shaker Heights could pay tribute to the region's founders. Concise and inclusive, trustees of the historical society decided on what they hoped would be a perfect tribute:
"First Burial 1811 / Final Resting Place Of / Pioneer Families / Manx Settlers / Veterans Of Five Wars / North Union Shakers"
Dedicated on Memorial Day, 1959, the plaque captured the stories of patriotic veterans, brave pioneers, industrious immigrants and pious Shakers. Its placement among the weathered gravestones offered a point of departure for discovering and memorializing the colorful, unique history of both Warrensville Township and Shaker Heights.
]]>The oldest homes in Shaker Heights were not built by Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen. They were built instead by migrants and immigrants who came to Warrensville Township in the first half of the nineteenth century to farm. They arrived in large numbers decades before the Van Sweringen brothers created Shaker Heights out of a part of Warrensville Township in the early twentieth century.
Many of the immigrants who came to Warrensville Township in the first half of the nineteenth century were from the Isle of Man, an island located in the Irish Sea between the British Isles and Ireland. They were known as Manx. In the 1850 U.S. census, 179 residents of Warrensville township identified themselves as immigrants from the Isle of Man, thus accounting for more than 12 percent of the township population in that year.
William and Jane Kewish, who built the Kewish home located at 19620 Chagrin Boulevard just west of Warrensville Center Road, were two of the hundreds of Manx immigrants who settled in Warrensville Township in the first half of the nineteenth century. They immigrated to America in 1834 and by the time of the 1840 U.S. census they were residing in Warrensville Township. In 1844, William, who had indicated in the 1840 census that he was employed in "navigation of the ocean" rather than agriculture, purchased 67 acres of farm land along what is now Chagrin Boulevard. By 1847, he had built the house at 19620 Chagrin Boulevard. Unfortunately, just two years later, in 1849, William died and the responsibility for farming the land he had purchased fell upon his widow Jane and the couple's sons, William and John. Jane and her sons received help from William Caine, a brother or other close relative of Jane Kewish, and also himself a Manx immigrant. With the help they received from their Caine relatives, Jane Kewish and her sons managed to successfully farm the land and the land remained in the Kewish family for almost an additional four decades before it was finally sold in 1887.
John Kehres purchased the Kewish home in 1887 and it remained in his family for several decades. During this time, the Kewish home was reputed to have served as the toll station for the Kinsman toll road. Kinsman Road was in the nineteenth century a major market road which ran all the way from Cleveland to the Pennsylvania border at Kinsman, Ohio. (That portion of the road passing through what eventually became Shaker Heights was renamed Chagrin Boulevard in the twentieth century.) In 1874, Warrensville's farmers formed a company for the purpose of constructing a plank road on the portion of Kinsman Road which extended from the Cleveland city limits to one mile past the Warrensville Town center, and to charge users of the road a toll in order to recover their building and maintenance expenses. This plank toll road remained in operation until about 1899.
During these years, the Kehres family became very influential in the affairs of Warrensville Township and later in East View, a small village carved out of township territory in 1905. Several members of the Kehres family became local government officials, and one member, W. F. Kehres, served as both Warrensville Township postmaster and as the first mayor of East View.
The William Kewish Home was designated a Shaker Heights landmark in 1976.
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