Local community members from the Big Bone Baptist Church and survey students at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College are working together to create a singular deed for the property and make a database of the church’s cemetery.
Cincinnati State Technical and Community College’s Land Surveying program has teamed up with Big Bone Baptist Church, located on Big Bone Church Road in Boone County, Ohio, to determine the boundary of the church’s property and begin the process of gathering names on all the church cemetery’s headstones.
Over the years the church has been in operation, headstones have faded and records have been misplaced. This has made the process of restoring the record of the cemetery quite difficult, and other members of the community have joined in to help.
The lands now known as the Big Bone Baptist Church were brought together on November 23, 1843 by a board of trustees composed of Jacob Hardesty, John Johnson, Samuel Mason, Robert Huey, and James R. Hawkins, along with John Wallace. Several other people have contributed to the growth of the church’s property including Martha and Norman Adair, G.W. Huey, and Erastus and Lizzie Garrison. Despite 178 years of contributions and dedication, the knowledge of who is buried, and where, has started to become lost.
Big Bone Baptist Church member Lisa Anglin hopes to restore church records, and has therefore joined with Cincinnati State survey students as well as professors Jim Decker, P.S. and Carol Morman, Ed.D., P.E., P.S. to begin work on the records project. The survey students have taken on the task of researching the history of the church to determine the boundary of its property, as well as gathering information on the headstones to be mapped and entered into databases.
Each spring semester for the next three years will take part in the project, with each class working on a different section of the cemetery. The participating students will use this project as their final project in their capstone class, which is required to graduate from Cincinnati State’s Bachelor of Applied Science in Land Surveying program.
The first class will focus on the oldest section of the Big Bone Church cemetery. As the headstones have seen a lot of deterioration and with many having been moved from their original locations, a North Carolina company, ESP Associates, Inc., has sent a team to assist with using ground penetrating radar to locate the burial sites. Anglin has also been looking to find someone to clean and restore the headstones that can be saved. Future classes will work on progressively newer sections of the cemetery.
Along with collecting information from the headstones, students will also be creating a topographic map that displays the features and contours of the land. Those contours will also be surveyed using a Lidar drone.
As far as determining the boundary of Big Bone Baptist Church’s property, there have been hours of searching the property and combing through the records at the Boone County Clerk’s Office, as well as discussions with local surveyor Edwin Kirkpatrick, and local church members. Some areas of the church’s properties and neighboring properties’ histories have been simple to trace, while others have presented a greater challenge.
According to an article from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, the church’s property was determined by examining previous survey results and the church’s deeds, as well as evidence on site that was described by those surveys and deeds. After the students finish the project, Tom Bushelman, PLS, a local surveyor, will verify the boundaries of the church and work to have a new deed prepared and recorded so that there can be a singular description of the entire boundary of the church, rather than multiple deeds describing multiple pieces. This should make a more definite border to quell any future questions over land ownership.
Future plans for the Big Bone Baptist Church include the creation of a formal database of the cemetery, which the Cincinnati State survey students are planning to join the land surveying workforce and work toward getting their professional licensure for the tri-state area.
More information about the Big Bone Baptist Church can be found on its website, and more information about Cincinnati State Technical and Community College can be found at the school’s website here.