Essex Cemetery

ESSEX CEMETERY was established about 1840 on property owned by Isaac Bowen Essex in Rock Island County, Illinois.
The earliest tombstone found is 1841, but many graves have no stones.

In 1835 Isaac Bowen Essex bought 380 acres of land in Township 16 (later becoming Drury Township ) in Rock Island County, Illinois and arranged to have a house built to be ready when he arrived with his family. In November, Isaac his wife Isabella and six children left their home in Essex Township, Stark County, Illinois and moved 80 miles to Rock Island County only to arrive and find their new home had not been completed as promised. It was a hard winter and a rocky beginning for this family living in the yet untamed wilderness of western Illinois.

Isaac B. Essex was the second person to buy land in this area of Rock Island County but he is not as well remembered in the history books as other first settlers because he moved to Union County, Illinois in 1865 before most of them were written. Only his son Elijah T. Essex stayed in Drury Township and Elijah's children moved on to Iowa. Isaac's other sons Elisha, Simeon and Truman Essex moved west to Kansas and Nebraska. Thus by 1891 when Elijah Essex died, there were no more Essex's in Drury Township except for those interred in Essex Cemetery, which had started out as the family burying ground on a beautiful wooded knoll on the back part of their farm.

I found Essex Cemetery in June of 1998 quite by accident. Although I had been working on my family history since I was first married, I had only been working on my Essex family for about 2 years. My grandfather Reuben Essex was the only child of his father's second marriage and his parents divorced when he was a baby. He was born in Beatrice, Gage Co, Nebraska and moved to Illinois as a teenager, later moving to Michigan where he married and lived out his life. His Mother died of cancer a few years after his marriage and he was bitter about his father and had no contact with any of his Essex relations. I never knew even one Essex relative and in letters to my Grandfather asking about his family he was not very forthcoming with information.

In 1996 on a trip to Chicago's Newberry Library, I found the book Thomas & Elizabeth Bowen Essex of Maryland, Virginia & Illinois by Dr. Hiram Essex which included my Grandfather. Suddenly I knew a lot about my Essex Family. I discovered that my Great Great Grandfather Truman Bowen Essex, whom my Grandfather had known and told me about, was born in Drury Township and then moved to Beatrice, Nebraska with his wife and 3 children.

On our family vacation in June of 1998 my husband agreed to let me do a "little" genealogy as we traveled through Illinois and when we got to Rock Island we went to the Moline Library. They had a nice genealogy section and suddenly I spied a thin notebook that said ESSEX CEMETERY!! Imagine my excitement as I opened the notebook and found pictures of an overgrown abandoned cemetery and inscriptions for some of the tombstones. There was information on the location of the cemetery and the name of the farmer who owned all the land surrounding the cemetery. I called him to see about visiting and he said access would be impossible as the weeds would be 6 feet tall, I explained that I was only passing through Illinois and this was my family's cemetery so he gave me directions and was kind enough to take his mower in and clear a swath up to the old Essex graves.

As we drove back the half mile from the highway on the two track, we encountered several cattle gates which had to be opened & closed and then suddenly a beautiful wooded knoll came into view on our left across the cornfield which was Essex Cemetery. Upon arrival I was surprised by the size of the cemetery as I had pictured a very small family cemetery. There were remnants of a barbwire fence with corn growing on 3 sides and cows in the pasture on the south side.

In the center very tall horse weeds covered about a third of the cemetery with a dense growth of Tiger Lilies on the north & east sides, and prickly grasses on the sunnier south & west sides. The vegetation gave no hint of the tombstones hiding beneath but as I walked up to the top of the hill on the freshly mowed path I found several of the Essex tombstones leaning against the trunk of a dead tree. I had no time to waste and started photographing my family tombstones thinking I might never get back to this area again. I tried exploring the areas north & east but my fear of snakes kept me from venturing into the dense growth. After cutting down horseweeds,  I discovered a row of Essex family footstones which were barely visible as they had sunk down into the heavy clay soil. I dug them up, cleaned them, photographed them and replaced them in the same location.

I tried finding all of the tombstones listed in the Essex Cemetery notebook and cleaned those with lichens, copied the inscriptions and in the process I discovered many errors in the notebook I had found at the library. However many tombstones were hidden by the weeds and I found those on my next trip.

Yes, there was a next trip and another and another. . . for a total of twelve as of May 2008. I don't know why but something inside of me was so saddened by the sight of this neglected and abandoned cemetery that I vowed then and there that I would someday come back and try to clean it up. It sounds impossible when you realize that I live almost 9 hours away in Traverse City, Michigan, but something was drawing me back to this place where my ancestors are at rest in a peaceful wooded cemetery amid the corn and cows, much like it was in 1835 when Isaac Bowen Essex first laid eyes on this land.

Lauri Gartner, 2008

"Lauri has a love and passion for the Essex Cemetery that most people couldn't comprehend. She has taken an overgrown patch of land that an entire community forgot about 50 years ago and turned it back into a respectable place to be buried."
--Dave Moeller

"When I first came to Essex Cemetery, I could not see many graves. Since Lauri has put her heart into restoring the cemetery; it has become a peaceful place for our ancestors"

© Friends of Essex Cemetery, 2011