Hebron Cemetery History

In 1834 a baby boy was born to a
pioneer couple, Lewis and Jane McFarland in Adams County, Illinois. They named him Ira. Sadly, four months later
the infant died and his parents chose a serene area on a slight rise in the
Illinois prairie for his burial. His
grave faces east on a beautiful grassy quiet landscape which became known as
the McFarland Graveyard. After Hebron
Methodist Episcopal church was established in 1848 about a quarter mile away,
the cemetery was renamed Hebron Cemetery.
Hebron is one of the oldest continuously operating cemeteries in Adams
County. Located about three miles north
of Camp Point, Illinois off Highway 94, Hebron has been in operation for over
186 years.

The cemetery sits on 3.75 acres of
land originally owned by Lewis’ father John McFarland, who formally gifted the
land for use as a cemetery through a land deed in 1855. A second donation in August 1878 by Robert A.
Beckett and James Beckett expanded the cemetery to the size it is today. The cemetery is well kept and completely
enclosed by an iron fence erected in 1913 from Steward Iron Works of
Cincinnati, Ohio. The west side of the
cemetery features a large, historic entrance gate.

The cemetery is divided into eight
sections, labeled A through H and 46 rows.
The oldest graves are in the middle and back, located on the east side
of the cemetery in sections D-E-F, rows 1-5.
Newer burials are located closer to the west gate. There have been twenty burials since 2000.

Hebron is the final resting place of
some of Adams County’s earliest pioneers.
The McFarland family who donated the original land moved to Illinois from
Kentucky. Lewis McFarland gained prominence as Justice of the Peace for Adams
County for 36 years. Twelve individuals buried there were born in the late
1700s: the earliest birthdates belong to Anne Wilks (1768) and her husband
William Wilks (1769) who arrived in Adams County from Virginia in the 1820s. William A. Beckett, William Garner Sr., Andrew Hughs, John
A. McFarland, and John W. McFarland were all born close to the end of the
Revolutionary War and all fought in the War of 1812.

One third of the burials represent members of
prominent families of the surrounding region, with Becketts topping the list at
sixty-three, followed by forty-five Downings, forty-three McFarlands, thirty-four
McClintocks, thirty-one Whitfords, twenty-six Bottorffs, and twenty-two Garners.

Approximately 200
(one fourth) of the burials at Hebron are children under the age of ten including
many infants which is a testimony to the hardships associated with life on the
prairie in the mid to late 1800s. Dates
of death of these children maps closely the preponderance of deadly disease
outbreaks at the time, most notably the spread of Cholera in the 1840s and
1860s, the recurrence of small pox in the 1850s and 1880s, the wide spread devastation
of diphtheria in the late 1880s that preyed especially on children, and
respiratory flu epidemics that impacted the nation in the 1850s and 1870s.

Forty-seven Veterans are buried in Hebron,
representing service in every war from the War of 1812 through Vietnam. Twenty two of these veterans fought in the
Civil War, most in Company G of the Illinois 78th Infantry which
mustered into service in Quincy in 1862 and was discharged in July 1865. The 78th Infantry traveled on the
steamboat Jennie Whipple down the Mississippi, then up the Ohio River to
Kentucky, eventually participating in many key battles of the Civil War. The 78th
Infantry lost one hundred men in one day at the Battle of Chickamauga but
played a key role in capturing a unit of Confederate soldiers there. They joined Sherman’s campaign against
Atlanta, captured a rebel battery at Jonesboro, and later participated in Sherman’s
March to the Sea. At the end of the war, the 78th participated in
the Grand Review in Washington, DC before returning home to farms and
homesteads to resume life after three years at war. Four of the Civil War veterans buried at
Hebron — James M. Beckett, John Beckett, John Ehmen, and Charles Whitford –
lost their lives in battle. The
remaining eighteen returned home to tell their stories.

During the Civil War, young men were
recruited from the nearby Hebron Methodist Episcopal Church, and the church
continued to play a key role in honoring the service of Veterans until it
closed in 1920. Set in a heavily wooded area, the church is a red brick structure
with white trim and surrounded by a white clapboard fence. Men entered on one side, women on the other.
Two pot bellied stoves provided warmth in winter and eight full-length windows
opened to provide breeze in the summer. On
Decoration Day (Memorial Day) in the early 1900s, aging Civil War veterans were
invited to speak at the church. At the
conclusion of the program, children and young people carried evergreen wreaths
and flowers and marched down the road to the cemetery to decorate each grave.

The Hebron Cemetery Association, a
volunteer Board of Trustees, is one of the few remaining cemetery associations
that were chartered before the Civil War. In the earliest days of the cemetery,
requests for grave sites were recorded on an oil cloth laid out on the kitchen
table of the Association President. Today the board governs the Cemetery and
assures that the grounds, monuments, fencing and landscaping are kept in neat
condition and orderly repair. Since its
inception, there have been no fees for burial. The cemetery receives no monies
from federal, state or county taxes and relies on donations and on interest
from its Perpetual Trust Fund established in 1917. Records are no longer
maintained on oil cloth spread over the kitchen table.

Sources

“78th
Illinois Infantry Regiment.”

“

Cemeteries of Adams County

”, Volume V,
Great River Genealogical Society, Quincy, IL, October 1989.

Hebron
Cemetery Association. “Hebron Cemetery
Veterans’ Grave

.”

Unpublished manuscript.

Hebron
Cemetery Association. “List of Hebron Burials, 1989-2000.” Unpublished manuscript.

Hebron Cemetery Association. “List of Hebron
Burials, 2000-2019.” Unpublished manuscript.

Obituary,
Lewis McFarland,

Quincy Herald Whig

,
14 July 1881.

Street,
Janice. “The Hebron Cemetery Perpetual Endowment Fun.” Unpublished manuscript, 2017.

Street,
Janice. “History of Hebron Cemetery

.

” Unpublished manuscript, October 2014.

Wittemyer,
Beatrice August Dickhut. “

Hebron.

”
Unpublished memoire.