Old Brooklyn, Cleveland, Ohio
Tucked away next to a diner, it’s easy to overlook Brooklyn Union Burial Ground. All that you can see of the cemetery from the entrance (which is also the diner’s parking lot) is a small stone marker, seen above. The remainder of the cemetery, due to a lack of headstones, looks like an empty lot. That is until you look a little closer and see the few gravestones that still exist.
Early Settlers of Old Brooklyn
The Brooklyn Union Burial Ground has gone by many names. It started as the Brainard (Brainerd) Burial Ground, as it took up a corner of the Brainard property back in the 1820s. Despite that name, it wasn’t closed to members of nearby residents, as many members of the Fish, Chester, Stadler, Kohlmann, and Kluender families are buried here as well.
Another name for the cemetery, Broadview, is based on the main road that it’s located on.
Regardless of what you call it, what matters is that this tiny, out-of-the-way cemetery has a pretty interesting history.
History of the Brooklyn Union Burial Ground
Although the Brooklyn Union Burial Ground was never quite forgotten, it definitely spent some time getting overlooked. From the time of the first burial (around 1821) up until the 1940s, the area grew around it. Houses went up. A gas station appeared on one corner, which some suspected was put up over a few graves. A restaurant called Red Barn popped up in another spot, which is where the small diner is now. In fact, at one point the cemetery was labeled “abandoned” and sold by the state of Ohio due to unpaid property taxes.
Then, in the 1960s, everything changed. A local history group realized that the cemetery was there, and a man named William Fleck sued due to the lack of access to one of his family’s burial plots. His father was the last person officially buried there in 1923. By the time his mother died, the Red Barn had gone up over their plots, and there wasn’t any way to access the site that she’d paid for. The court case went nowhere, but it did bring the forgotten cemetery some attention.
A Rededication
Finally, by the 1990s, the Historical Society of Old Brooklyn and Neil Richardson, a local resident, stepped in and began researching the cemetery. This led to a detailed list of burials there, even though the headstones crumbled long ago. They had an official rededication of the cemetery in 2002, laying the official stone that marks the entrance to the burial ground.
Since there aren’t many gravestones left, it’s easy to overlook this cemetery, which plays an important role in memorializing the early settlers of Old Brooklyn and Cleveland itself.
Found in Ohio 