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Benjamin Robbins - Another Discovery in the Sugar Creek Cemetery!
By Jean Simpson, Education
Coordinator
Several years ago Vickie Bondi and I were trained as volunteer tour guides at the Sugar Creek Baptist Cemetery and learned the location of the burial sites of many of our early settlers including Aaron Nutt and Dr. John Hole. We were told that the headstones of founder Benjamin Robbins and his wife Bathsheba were missing, so we assumed that they had fallen over as so many of the stones have done.
Since we have records that tell the location of their headstones, I would sometimes go to the cemetery early on a tour day and look for a broken base where they might have been. While researching the John Harris headstone (last month's Curator) I perused two photo albums compiled in 1976 that show the Robbins’s headstones, so I knew that they had been standing 31 years ago!
Then in mid November I was talking with Tony Stevens, the cemetery sexton, and asked him if he knew where the Robbins headstones might be (thinking that maybe someone had saved them.) He said he would show them to me. I asked him where they were and he replied that they were at the cemetery – still standing!!! So Curator Ferne Reilich and I met Tony and he took us to the headstones.
Ironically, they are just one row back from a stop on the tour, but as you can see from Marilyn William’s photo, the inscription is hard to read. I am so glad to know that the headstones are safe and that we can show them to folks in the community.
Benjamin Robbins, along with Aaron Nutt and Benjamin Archer surveyed the land here in 1796. Ben Robbins chose a quarter section of land northwest of the present town center because of the many springs. The following spring he and his wife Bathsheba Nutt Robbins (Aaron’s sister) and their children arrived from Dry Ridge, Ky. and lived in a log cabin at the site of the present Routsong Funeral Home. He soon built a one-story stone house that is believed to be at the back of the present day house. The two-story stone house was likely added about 1820. Benjamin Robbins died in 1837, so his headstone has been standing for 170 years! |