Early Settlers Burying Ground and Ephraim Cutler's Ohio

This pioneer cemetery in Bethel holds some of the founding names of this corner of Ohio. Obed Denham, who donated the burial plot, is credited as Bethel's founder. Thomas Morris, an Ohio legislator and United States Senator, is also associated with Bethel and is said to rest here, an Ohio legislator and United States Senator who became one of the earliest antislavery voices in the Senate during the eighteen thirties.

Local tradition says that in one corner lies a man remembered only as the Unknown Hunter, said to be the first person buried here, befriended by Denham before a name was ever recorded. Together these stories form an accidental portrait of a frontier community still writing its own rules, where ordinary settlers and national figures ended up side by side in the same clay.