Read time: 5 min.

In the summer of 2019, my mom and I used an heirloom as a roadmap. Armed with an 1866 diary written by our ancestor Mary Jane Edwards, we spent several long days traveling to Quaker meetinghouses and their nearby burial grounds. One stop along that trail led us to the old Clear Spring Cemetery in Henry County. It’s a small, unassuming place waiting for someone to slow down and check it out. Those someones were us.

Quakers were among the very first settlers to put down roots in what eventually became Henry County’s Harrison Township. On April 24, 1832, families with names still familiar to local history, like Ratliff, Price, Newby, Stafford, Cook, and Phelps, gathered for a Friends meeting inside a log cabin. They named their new meeting for a free-flowing spring along nearby Duck Creek¹. 

A year later, the gathering was formally organized as a preparative meeting. By 1834², land had been set aside next door for a graveyard. The first burial at Clear Spring was John Stafford, who was just twelve when he passed on February 1, 1834. Less than a decade later, the community replaced its original log structure with a simple frame meetinghouse

At some early point, there may have been a Clear Spring community⁴. If there was such a place, it was never platted as a town and doesn’t appear to have featured any commercial structures. An 1857 plat map shows a schoolhouse standing beside the meetinghouse⁵ -almost certainly a Quaker endeavor. Unfortunately, it’d vanished from the map by 1875⁶. Any community around Clear Spring was probably just a small group of houses around the church, which was remodeled in 1895⁷.

Clear Spring entered a new chapter in 1910 with the arrival of its first paid minister, John Kitterman. The congregation continued to grow and achieved Monthly Meeting status in 1945. Another remodel of the meetinghouse occurred five years later, but the momentum didn’t last: in 1966, Clear Spring was discontinued when its remaining members joined meetings in nearby Cadiz and Kennard⁸. The 123-year-old meetinghouse was torn down the following year, but its front steps were preserved as a memorial to mark where generations once gathered.

Today, what remains of Clear Spring is both a cemetery and a graveyard, so long as you’re inclined toward some historical pedantry. While both words describe burial grounds, a “graveyard” typically refers to a cemetery next to a church⁹. With the Friends meetinghouse long gone, the distinction has blurred. At Clear Spring, either label feels fitting.

Roughly four hundred graves at Clear Spring are marked, but that number only tells part of the story: early Quakers famously disapproved of headstones and viewed them as a form of idolatry¹⁰. That means many burials went unmarked . As a result, it’s impossible to know how many people truly lie at rest at Clear Spring! Walking the grounds, though, familiar surnames surface again and again- Adams, Hutson, Pearce, Phelps, Spencer, Starbuck, and Williams, among others. 

It’s a shame that my inner pioneer cemetery geek hadn’t fully woken up by the time I visited Clear Spring Friends. I came away with only a handful of photos -shots of the old meetinghouse site and a few wide views of the surrounding burial ground- rather than the close-ups of interesting markers I’d take today. Still, even those broad images capture the quiet weight of the place and hint at the many stories resting just beneath the grass.

Clear Spring doesn’t shout its history. There’s no meetinghouse anymore, no town around it, and few markers to guide you beyond the lane and the trees. What it offers instead is quieter. Following Mary Jane Edwards’ diary brought my mom and me to plenty of meaningful places, but Clear Spring lingers because of what’s missing as much as what remains.

Sources Cited
1 Ratliff, R. P. (1970). Our Special Heritage. The Sesquicentennial Publication of Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends. Community Printing Company [New Castle]. Book.
2 Hinshaw, W.W. (1936). Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy: Abstracts of the records of the Society of Friends in Indiana; Parts 1-6 edited by Willard Heiss. Edwards Bros. [Richmond]. Book. 
3 (See footnote 1). 
4 Greensboro (1914, August 6). The Tri-County Banner. p. 4. 
5 Map of Henry County, Indiana (1857). Harwood & Watson [New Castle]. Map. 
6 An illustrated historical atlas of Henry Co., Indiana / compiled, drawn & published from personal examinations & surveys by Higgins Belden & Co. (1875). Higgins, Belden, & Company [Chicago]. Map.
7 (See footnote 1). 
8 (See footnote 1). 
9 What’s the difference between ‘cemetery’ and ‘graveyard’? (n.d.) Merriam-Webster. Web. Retrieved December 19, 2025. 
10 Quaker Cemetery (n.d.). Nantucket Historical Association [Massachusetts]. Web. Retrieved December 19, 2025.