Bethel Presbyterian Cemetery: Patriots' Resting Ground
They fought tyranny and helped give birth to the United States of America, but many laid long forgotten in the earth at Bethel Cemetery.
Then a woman from Texas called Bethel Presbyterian Church asking for help tracking down the grave of an ancestor who had fought in the American Revolution. Cary Grant, the unofficial church historian, found the soldier's headstone in the graveyard of the church.
“I got to thinking, Bethel is so historic, being established in 1764, there had to be more,” Grant said about the Revolutionary War soldiers' graves. “I told my wife, ‘We're taking on this project'.”
With help from Lucy Willis, state historian with the Daughters of the American Revolution, Grant came up with a list of 48 names of Revolutionary War soldiers buried in the cemetery. And there could be more, Willis said.
Wyant and Son, a stone monument company from Gastonia, N.C., recently installed a two-ton granite marker at the cemetery to recognize the Revolutionary veterans. It will be dedicated during a ceremony there at 10 a.m. today.
The monument will include the names of 29 of the roughly four dozen soldiers buried there. The other 19 to 21 names are still pending DAR approval and will be added to the monument at a later date, Grant said.
Leon Wyant, who made the monument, said it is the first DAR monument he has made this large, or with this many names. The slab of granite, shaped like a tombstone, stands nearly 6 feet tall. It's 3 feet wide and 8 inches thick, he said. The stone took six weeks to move from the quarry in Georgia to Gastonia. Wyant spent a week cutting, polishing and engraving it.
He'll return to add the remaining names after they are approved.
Bethel church was founded in 1764 and was at the heart of the Colonial rebellion in South Carolina, Grant said. Many of its members participated in the Battle of King's Mountain, described as the turning point in the war.
After the battle, Grant reports, women from Bethel church mounted their horses, rode to the scene at King's Mountain and brought their dead and wounded men home on crude sleds. The church building served as a hospital after the battle. The current church building was built later, in 1873.
Wyant made a smaller monument for Capt. John Barber, the Revolutionary War veteran whose grave was identified by Grant after the call from Texas, at the request of his descendants. That monument was installed in the cemetery in 2007. The marker was sponsored by a DAR chapter in New Mexico.
Willis said the earlier dedication ceremony was her first visit to Clover, though she had been to King's Mountain for the Revolutionary War re-enactments several times. “While I was there, Cary and his wife, Helen, and other church members told me about the church history and the number of Patriots buried there.”
Willis worked with Grant for several months to document all of the soldiers' service in the war. Then she took a request to mark the graves to the DAR National Conference in 2007 and then to the Historian General's office.
“They said, yes, they'd let us do it, and I was surprised because we have a rule that a (DAR) chapter or (state) society can only mark five graves,” she said. “But some of those men buried there have already been established with at least one DAR member joining under their name.”
DAR members have to prove a family link to someone who served in the American Revolution to join under that Patriot's name, Willis said. No one had joined the organization under the names of several soldiers buried at Bethel.
“This is the first time we've had this many Patriots without a member (in one place),” Willis said. “This is the first time the S.C. DAR chapter is doing a monument this large with this many names.”
Willis and Grant still have a lot of work to do to get the other names added. Most of the research is done by going through records at the S.C. Department of Archives and History. “It's getting easier because all the old documents and records are now on microfilm,” she said.
Those who are buried in the cemetery usually lived and had families nearby. “All of these Patriots lived in that area and they were all neighbors and intermarried,” Willis said.
But now, the families have spread far beyond York County. Willis, who now lives in Alabama, and Grant expect visitors to attend the ceremony from North Carolina, Alabama, Texas, New Mexico and other states.
More information about DAR is available at http://www.dar.org/.
[text by Jonathon Allen of Rock Hill Herald]
ABOVE: Church historian Cary Grant places a flag on the grave of Colonel Samuel Watson at Bethel Presbyterian Church in Clover, SC. [photos by: Andy Buress, Rock Hill Herald,]
