Honcut Cemetery, Butte County, California
By Joyce Lent Bode
Early in my learning about how to do genealogical research,
I attended a seminar session on writing for cemetery records. So because of
this new knowledge, I wrote to the Sexton of Honcut Cemetery, Butte County,
California, to obtain whatever information I could on the Merrill family.
My letter was returned. I later found out why.
On
April 13, 1990, my mother (Doris Merrill Lent) and I drove to the town of
Honcut to locate the cemetery. Honcut is rather a small town to say the least.
There is a school and one gas-grocery-general store. One of the newspaper
articles written after Daniel Page's death stated that "he was the first
resident to give Honcut an impetus." I guess when he died, the impetus
died, too. The article also stated he established a large general merchandise
store and was the first postmaster. I wonder if the gas-grocery-general store
we saw was the one he started.
We stopped to ask a local resident where to find the cemetery and he said to go east about four miles, and the cemetery was out in the field on the left. He thought we needed to get the key from "Mrs. Osgood in the house at the top of the hill on the right side of the road." After going for about four miles, there was indeed a hill on the right and we went up. Sure enough, Mrs. Osgood lived there, and she did have the key to the cemetery. She was about 90 years old and wanted to tell me the entire history of the Honcut cemetery and how the records had been lost, and how no one is caring for the cemetery now and how there has been fire and vandalism and... I explained that I was on a very tight time schedule and must go on to see the cemetery. She also said that there were no "old timers" left who could tell me about the cemetery. I wondered what she considered herself. She asked what name I was searching for, and when I said Merrill, she said she remembered that name.
The gate to the road leading into the cemetery was another few yards on down the road on the left, but the gate wasn't locked. By this time we could see the small cemetery sitting under some oak trees out in the field, with no buildings, no cemetery office, and certainly no Sexton! We drove to the gate of the cemetery, and it wasn't locked either so we drove inside. It only took a few minutes to spot the Merrill plot. What a thrill! The plot was about a six-lot size, but there were only two names on the center stone as follows: Gilman Merrill, September 19, 1806-January 26, 1886, was on the front, and Elbridge G. Merrill, October 1, 1853-February 16,1881 was on the south side of the pillar. The name Merrill was on the step leading into the plot, and there were two head markers; one said Elbridge and the other one said Father. There was a small metal stake in the plot, but nothing was legible on it.
According to family and newspaper accounts, Austin Page
is buried there as well as Daniel Page, Hattie Talbot Merrill (Daniel Page's
wife), Mary Goss Page Merrill (Gilman's wife), and my cousin, Larry Green,
indicated that Elbridge Clark Merrill, Austin's brother, died in Chicago but
was also buried at Honcut. Either it is a larger plot than I estimated, or
it is really crowded!
I wrote to the Paradise Genealogy Society and they sent
a copy of the records of the Honcut cemetery, but only the two names from
the tombstone are listed.
I took photographs of the cemetery to document what I found.
We had a good laugh about why my letter was returned "no caretaker no
one to receive a letter." It could have just gone to the "dead"
letter office.
