Harris Family Cemetery, and the grave behind the mill house

SBAGS Cemetery Locations; the Lyon paper (South Bend Weekly Tribune, 6 July 1901), reprinted whole in Howard (1907) I

The township's oldest burial story ends in a ground with no stones. The society's list carries Harris Family, Clay Township, S ½ of Section 23, T38N R2E, "(Also known as Sider's Mill)," standing "on the grounds of what is now the Isaac Walton League," with its whole condition in one sentence: "Private Property… all headstones are gone." Section 23 is the townsite section; Siders' mill is the flouring mill Jonas Harris built in the winter of 1836–37; and the Lyon paper tells where the builder lies: Harris died about 1843 and "was buried, at his own request, on the farm back of the house, his wife Barbara Beeson Harris later beside him — a grave the paper says still lay undisturbed under cultivation in 1901, its place 'really unknown.'" The correlation is exact in its parts — the same section, the mill's own name, a family ground gone stone-less — and it is printed at pointer strength only: the society's entry does not name Jonas Harris, and the identification of the Harris Family ground with the mill house burial is not proven. The society's reading of the ground in its Clay Township volume and the full text of the Lyon paper are the settlers (G-CEM-8). What prints as fact is both halves, unmerged: a Harris family ground stood on the mill section and its stones are gone; and a mill builder and his wife were buried behind the mill house on that section and their grave's place was already unknown in 1901. If they are the same ground — and the record leans that way without standing on it — then the first burial of the townsite ground is also its least findable.