Read time: 9 min.

I’ve driven through and poked around Delaware County’s unincorporated community of Granville, Indiana, for years. By now, I’ve gotten my passport stamped at nearly every attraction the little place has to offer: the landmark flowing well, the old schoolhouse, and the metal truss bridge just east of town. One stubborn blank spot remained on my Granville checklist, though: I could see the Granville Cemetery, but I just couldn’t get to it!

Granville Cemetery sits on a lonely hill southeast of town, far from any public road and surrounded by private property. Over the years, I’d caught glimpses of it from a distance and wondered about the people buried there. Many old cemeteries are easy to explore, but this one might as well have been on an island! Fortunately, after years of looking toward that hill, I finally got a chance to climb it.

Granville is the only extant community in Niles Township. Unfortunately, calling it a community probably elevates it beyond its actual stature these days, since the place consists of maybe twenty houses depending on where you draw the boundaries. Still, Granville was much more prominent nearly two centuries ago.

Platted in 1836, the town became a trading center along the Mississinewa River and grew to rival nearby Georgeville¹, which disappeared. Investors even thought Granville might make a good seat of Delaware County, but Muncie’s central influence put the kibosh on those dreams².

Granville sits about nine miles northeast of Muncie as the crow flies. Its cemetery lies back from the old Peterson Ford Bridge. You can spot its scattered old stones from several vantage points around the area, but no public road leads to them. The cemetery itself belongs to the Niles Township Trustee³, but reaching it requires receiving permission to cross private property. Fortunately, I visited with a group that did just that. 

Granville Cemetery doesn’t feature some grand entrance at the top of the hill. There isn’t a paved lane or manicured grounds to announce that we’d arrived. Around 379 burials have been documented at Granville, although I suspect the true number is higher. Time -and vandals⁴– have not been kind to the place. Many headstones are broken, damaged, or slowly disappearing into the earth.

For a cemetery I’d spent years wanting to see, there was almost too much to look at once I finally got there. The oldest burial with a surviving marker belongs to William Battreall, who died in 1834 at sixteen or seventeen years old. At the other end of the cemetery’s timeline, the newest monument memorializes John W. Niccum, who died in 1939. Their stones bookend more than a century of burials in Niles Township. 

I arrived at Granville with a specific task to accomplish, but before I got to it, I couldn’t resist wandering around. One grave I especially wanted to find belonged to Amos Wilson, purported to be a Revolutionary War Patriot. His burial in Delaware County was confirmed by my dad’s great-uncle, Dr. Bert Anson⁵. I’ve seen Wilson described as a drummer boy⁶, although I haven’t dug deeply enough into his story to write about him yet. More research is forthcoming.

From there, I started roaming. Way back in the cemetery’s northwest corner, I encountered a familiar name, or almost familiar, anyway. An obelisk marks the grave of Isaac Shideler, although the monument spells the name “Shidler.” He was the father of Isaac H. Shideler, a railroad promoter and local landowner⁷ who established a depot, post office, and general store in the tiny community that eventually took his name⁸. Unfortunately, I’m not related.

Nearby, three much smaller markers told sadder stories. They belong to Monta, Rosa, and Sarah Raynolds, three children who died as toddlers or infants during the 1870s. I haven’t been able to determine where their parents, G.A. and J.K. Raynolds, were buried, but it doesn’t appear that they joined their children at Granville. Visits to pioneer cemeteries are often sad ones, and this group of graves was heartbreaking. 

Aside from the tragedy of three siblings dying so young, their markers caught my attention for another reason: they’re made of “white bronze,” actually a zinc alloy molded into inexpensive tombstones by the Monumental Bronze Company between 1874 and 1914⁹. The material was marketed as an alternative to stone¹⁰ and, in many cemeteries, the bluish-gray monuments have weathered far better than their limestone contemporaries. The Raynolds markers have generally held up well, too, but Sarah’s has a gaping hole. 

Another, much larger, white-bronze monument stands nearby. It belongs to Jacob and Elizabeth Slonaker, who died in 1880 and 1881. Jacob entered local government young and became the Hamilton Township Trustee at thirty-three. Fifteen years later, he was elected Hamilton Township Treasurer¹¹.

Finally wandering around a place I’d spent years seeing only from a distance was weird. From the roads below, Granville Cemetery had always been little more than a mysterious cluster of stones on a hill. Up close, those stones resolved into people: teenagers, toddlers, township officials, and pioneers. The isolation only added to the experience. Granville Cemetery was unbelievably quiet. No traffic passed its entrance because there really wasn’t one. 

Then a car came clattering across the metal deck of the Peterson Ford Bridge a third of a mile away. From the hilltop, it sounded like gunfire! The racket broke my spell and reminded me that I hadn’t finally made it to Granville Cemetery just to wander around. I was there for a reason. 

For the past year, I’ve been working with Kathi Kesterson, regent of Muncie’s Paul Revere Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, to tell the stories of Delaware County’s Revolutionary War Patriots and their families in a way that hadn’t been attempted before. We wanted to go beyond names, dates, and genealogies to figure out who these people actually were, what they did, and how they wound up here. I think we succeeded.

Amos Wilson’s story is still waiting for us, but Anna Smith Custer’s wasn’t. She was the widow of a Revolutionary War Patriot, and she was buried at Granville¹². Thanks to a grant the Paul Revere Chapter secured from Indiana’s America 250 Semiquincentennial Commission, her grave -and those of the other Patriots we’ve researched- now features a durable metal sign bearing a QR code. Instead of encountering nothing more than a name and a pair of dates carved into an old stone, someone standing at one of these graves can pull out the phone and meet the person buried there.

Ultimately, that’s what brought me to Granville along with Kathi and her fellow DAR member Jennie Irving, who drove us back to the cemetery, off-road, with permission from the property owners. We believe she rests near her daughters Susannah Custar Battreall and Anna Custar O’Neal. Those markers are missing, but the broken headstone nearest the site belongs to Anna’s son-in-law, William Battreall. That’s where we placed the sign. 

Granville Cemetery is full of people who are becoming harder to find. Some of their stones are broken, weathered beyond recognition, or simply disappearing. Others, like Anna, have no surviving marker at all. The little metal sign we planted can’t replace her missing headstone, but it gives her a presence there again. Ultimately, that’s what my project with Kathi and the DAR has been about: turning names and dates back into people.

Eventually, we climbed back into Jennie’s car and clambered home from Granville Cemetery the way we’d arrived, bumping across private property towards County Road 879 West. The cemetery disappeared behind us until it became a distant scattering of stones again. After years of wondering what was up there, though, now I know some of the people who were buried at Granville. If you happen to get permission to visit the cemetery and stumble across William Battreall’s broken stone someday, scan Anna Smith Custar’s code nearby.

Sources Cited
1 Flook, C. (2019). Lost Towns of Delaware County, Indiana. The History Press [Charleston]. book.
2 Haimbaugh, F.D. (1924). History of Delaware County Indiana. Historical Publishing Company [Indianapolis]. Book. 
3 Parcel 0432300005000 (2026). Office of the Assessor. Delaware County [Muncie]. Web. Retrieved September 15, 2026. 
4 Granville Cemetery Damaged by Vandals (1968, October 23). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 27. 
5 Barnet, B. (1976, July 4). Pvt. Polen Watched Redcoats Quit on Grandest Day in World History. The Muncie Star. p. 37. 
6 Kreps, M. & Shideler, T. (2026, September 12). Personal communication. 
7 Kemper, G. W. H. (1908). Education in Delaware County. In A Twentieth Century History of Delaware County, Indiana, Volume 1. book, Lewis Publishing Company.
8 Helm, T. B. (1881). Mount Pleasant Township. In History of Delaware County, Indiana: With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers. book, Kingman Brothers.2 (See footnote 2).
9 Haugh, C. (2019, September 8). White Bronze Markers. Mount Olivet Cemetery [Frederick]. Web. Retrieved June 18, 2025. 
10 (See footnote 9). 
11 Robertson (1880, March 30). The Muncie Daily Times. p. 3. 
12 Anna (Smith) Custar, widow of William Custar, affidavit for pension and bounty land, dated 26 March 1851, Delaware County, Indiana; Revolutionary War pension and bounty land warrant application file of William Custar (widow’s claim), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, D.C., Record Group 15, Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs; Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application Files, 1800-1906 (NARA microfilm publication M804); digitized images, Fold3 (https:..www.fold3.com : accessed 3 January 2026); affidavit transcribed by Kathryn Hirons Kesterson.