The Franklinton Graveyard

"In the year 1796, or early 1797, Lucas Sullivant, from Kentucky, then a young man, with his corps of chain-carriers, markers, etc., engaged in the surveying of lands and locating warrants, in the Virginia Military District, west of the Scioto; and in the month of August, 1797, he laid out the town of Franklinton." Thus begins the first History of Franklin County, that of William T. Martin published in 1858. The first settlers of Franklinton, which was the first settlement of whites in the Scioto Valley north of Chillicothe, arrived in the fall or winter after its platting. With their arrival came the need for a place of burial. According to documents provided by a descendant of Lucas Sullivant at the time of the Columbus sesquicentennial in 1962, that burial place, still known as the Franklinton Cemetery, was dedicated to public use in 1799.

The largest part of the selected site was on a northward-jutting portion of the relatively high ground on which the town was laid out, bound on the south by Water Street of the town plat and on the northeast by the Scioto River. The western boundary of the property extended to the present Souder Avenue, and remained there as late as 1830. At that time an alteration of the Franklinton-Dublin road began at the northwest corner of the town plat of Franklinton, "from which the S.W. corner of the grave yard bears N 48^O E 2 poles 22 links," or about 48 feet.¹ The western portion of this land, which was in an ancient course of the river, at some later date (which has been impossible to determine precisely) was struck off for use in another alteration of the road. Compensation apparently was made for this loss by the extension of the property on the south, by sixty-four

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