• Van Dine, Warren L., "Forsythe Family Cemetery, Chili Township, Hancock County, Illinois" (March 6, 1972).

• Category: Transcript

• Author: Van Dine, Warren L.
• Publisher: March 6, 1972
• Submitter: Eddie Forsyth

EF Note: This Forsythe Family Cemetery burial list was compiled by Warren L. Van Dine and this introduction was written by him March 6, 1972. He made a trip to the cemetery that day.
EF Note: This list would seem to indicate more than one person is interred in this cemetery, two at least. It is quite often the case as many as a dozen are buried in a family plot, maybe with but one or two having monuments. This may well be the case here. The negro slave woman with the Forsythe family mentioned above was buried in the Forsythe burying ground of this list and not in the Owen family plot which is located in Sect. 31 about a mile west of Forsythe as one might get the impression from the statements.

• Text: To get to this burying ground where one man who passed from this mundane existance in 1871, worn out by its multitudinous details no doubt, waits for the trump of God to call him back to the world of the living rests beneath marble (two marble monuments in fact) the motorist takes Illinois State hard road No. 94 south out of Carthage (the County seat). After traveling at such speeds as would be deemed safe on that run down old concrete slab for about 12 miles he will then come to what is referred as the West Point Y. The hard road runs off both east and west, but there is a blacktop continuance of the straight south drive. There is about 2 1/2 miles of that and then the road but from the point on loose gravel goes on south into Adams County. About a quarter of a mile above the Adams County line on this loose gravel is the Forsythe Family Cemetery on the east side of the road perched at the very edge of the ditch. Here the motorist parks as best he can on such a narrow road for here is where the Forsythe name is chisled on marble designating where God have given them the peace that falls like a mantle over sleeper and couch when "the fever called living" is over at last.
      There is a new quite large steel pike [?] bridge on the road just south of the site. Illinois used to be called "an empire of mud" when this deceased man of the Forsythe family walked God's earth at this point and this area where this gentleman waits the resurrection as has been indicated looks like what is left of that shrunken realm of mud in this State. It is a muddy dripping wet mile of prairie fields here in other words.
  The cemetery is about the size of a housewife's living room, say 8 by 12, the long side facing the road. It is enclosed with a yard high or ornamental type of fence but one very substantial. The posts are common farm field but straight, not the crooked kind.
      There are two marble monuments, very old, upward of a century standing there on the western Illinois landscpe turning gray and finally black, no longer shining white from the dealer's floor. Probably the dealer himself whoever he was has been with earth's multitudes who sleep, at least three quarters of a century. Both stones are for the same man. Sometimes our love ones who survive us a few short seasons decide we rate more imposing marble and lay cash money on the counter for a bigger monument in later times but neglect to take the first one from the grave. Anyway there are two here seperated by a distance of about four feet. Both these stones can be seen quite a distance from either side of the road.
      There is no brush, weeds or tall grass inside the enclosure. In fact there are none outside. The grass area extends from an east-west side road that feeds in from the east close in on the north almost to the bridge on the road to the south.
      There is prairie brush and undergrowth close [to] the creek which is bridged with a pipe one on the road as stated, this on that side of the road. This creek goes off to the northeast. There is a triangular cultivated field between it and the strip of turf on which the cemetery is located.
      People say there used to be a rural school house here, probably north some and not deeper east on the round, called the Forsythe School. If so the Forsythe man who is interred here may have learned to read, write, and cipher in a shack of a building on these grounds where he laid down his bones when his Christian warfare was over and he was escorted to the throne of God by angels.
      But down the road north on the southwest corner on the other side of the road is an abandoned, concrete block foundation about the size of a country school house. Quite likely this is where the school house actually was.
      Who was the Forsythe family. According to Mr. Donald Parker, a Chili Township farmer who wrote the Township chapter in the 1968 Hancock County, Illinois History the Forsythe School (District No. 221) was founded by the Alpha Forsythe family and it was closed in 1924. He gives Sect. 32 of Chili Township as the location of the school and also of the cemetery. This was P. 270 about the school.
      Back on P. 261 he states the Forsythe family came to Illinois and to this part of the state from Kentucky. The Forsythe family after coming here met and intermaried with the Worrell family. They were a family according to the 1874 Andress County Atlas, Subscriber's Section, P. 25, who came from New Jersey. But Mr. Parker on P. 259 says from Pennsylvania. They could have come from both states.
      There were three Southern families here in Chili Township who are generally grouped together, the Owen and Dickerson families who intermarried from Maryland (the 1921 Charles J. Schofield County History, Vol. 2, P. 1187, states that but Mr. Parker gives it as Virginia) and the Forsythe family. The Forsythes as stated intermarried with a Northern family called Worrell.
      These three Southern families were people of property, in most cases "heavy landowners" in places from which they came and slave owners too. There were that there in Ilinois too, in Chili Township, also in St. Albans Township, also across the County line in Adams County.
      One of the Dickerson family women back in Maryland was married to the Hon. Ephraim Wilson who was a United States Senator from Maryland in those days.
      Each of the families brought a negro woman slave with them to Ilinois.
  
  Mr. Parker states this, P. 261:
      "The Civil War meant many things to the people of the area. A Number had come from Southern states, particulary Kentucky and Virginia. Some even brought negro nannies with them. One came with the Owen family. She is buried in an unmarked plot in the S. W. quarter of section 31. Another was a gift to the Forsythe family when they left their Kentucky home. She was buried in the family plot. Another belonged to the Alfred Dickerson family and was buried in the Chili Cemetery. The last two mentioned lived long after the Civil War anded and both remained with their 'families' as long as they lived.