Published: June 05, 2007 08:15 pm            

Graves of prominent settlers located in cemetery

A local man made an important find lately. And it made Dr. Bert Hudson and others very happy.

“For the past four years, members of the Lady Dunn Cemetery Association have been searching for the grave of Celey (Celia) Morris Harvey, a direct descendant of the first permanent settler in the Kanawha Valley,” Hudson, president of the Lady Dunn Cemetery Association, explained in a recent e-mail. “We knew that Celia Morris Harvey, the mother of Morris Harvey, was buried in the Lady Dunn cemetery but nobody had seen her grave since 1981 when Helen S. Stinson, a noted West Virginia genealogy researcher, surveyed the cemetery. Thus, it was not known whether the tombstone of Celia Morris Harvey was still standing.”

That changed in mid-May.

“... on Thursday, May 15, 2007, Walter Tucker of Montgomery located the grave and guided two other members of the Lady Dunn Cemetery Association to the graves of Celia Morris Harvey and her husband, Capt. John Harvey,” Hudson went on. “Pictures of the tombstones were taken by Mr. Jim Shaffer of Powellton.”

LDCA members have taken strides in recent years to clean up the cemetery and locate and identify gravesites.



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According to Hudson, a resident of San Angelo, Texas, Celia Morris Harvey is an “excellent example of an American woman whose care, education, guidance and training of her son made it possible for him to achieve greatness in adulthood.”

Celia Harvey, the first person known to be buried in the Lady Dunn Cemetery, was a member of the pioneer family that established the first permanent settlement in the Kanawha Valley. George Atkinson, in his book, “History of Kanawha County, West Virginia from its organization in 1789 until present time,” reported that the William Morris family arrived in the Kanawha Valley in 1774, becoming the first permanent settlers in that area. (A Mr. Kelly attempted to settle in the Kanawha Valley prior to the Morris family but hostile Indians killed him shortly after he arrived.)

The will of William M. Morris, according to the Kanawha County, WV, Will Book A, establishes that Benjamin Morris was his natural son. As shown in the last will and testament of Benjamin Morris (Kanawha County Wills), and the will of his wife Nancy Jarrett Morris (Circuit Superior Court of Law and Chancery, Kanawha Co., WV), Celey (Celia) Morris Harvey, who was born in Kanawha County on June 4, 1792, was their natural daughter.

William Morris and his sons were crucial to the political organization, settlement and survival of Kanawha County, Hudson says. For example, the homes of several members of the Morris family served as military forts, author Ruth Wood Dayton wrote, and were an important part of the Virginia militia system that protected the Upper Kanawha Valley from Indian attacks. Six of Morris’ sons, including Major William Morris Jr., served in the army that fought and won the battle of Point Pleasant in 1784, according to Dayton.

Celia Morris, who married Capt. John Harvey on Feb. 16, 1816, in Orange Co., Va., spent most of her marriage living in Kanawha County in a home originally built by her father, which came to be known as the “Morris Mansion,” on the north side of the Kanawha River at a site opposite the present day city of Montgomery, according to Dayton’s book, “Pioneers and Their Homes on Upper Kanawha.” After living in the Morris Mansion only a year of two, Benjamin Morris sold it to his brother, Levi, and moved to land he owned on the south side of the Kanawha.

When their son Morris Harvey, the youngest of their seven children, was four years of age, Capt. John Harvey and Celia Morris Harvey moved into the mansion so she could care for her ailing father. Her father died about one year after she moved into the mansion and that home became her family’s home until her death on January 4, 1836, according to West Virginia History: A Quarterly Magazine, Mildred Haptonstall Hill, Vol. XII, 1950. Capt. Harvey lived in Raleigh County at the time of his death.

Both Celia and John Harvey were buried in the Lady Dunn Cemetery, which is located on the hillside just north of the old Morris Mansion. Many years after the death of John Harvey, the old mansion was acquired by the Cannelton Coal and Coke Company and converted into that company’s main office building.

The Lady Dunn Cemetery, which was first known as the old Cannelton burial ground, was the primary burial ground for the community of Cannelton and much of the surrounding area from 1836 until 2003, according to Hudson. Stinson surveyed the site in 1981 and said that the cemetery, which was then called the Dunn Cemetery, covered two hillsides and contained hundreds of graves. The LDCA’s list of persons known to be buried in the Lady Dunn Cemetery, most of which has been verified by comparison with West Virginia’s official death records, currently consists of over 400 names.

However, there are hundreds of unmarked graves in the cemetery and many of the families who have relatives buried there have moved away and forgotten about their loved ones, Hudson says. An unknown number of these graves date back to the early period of settlement of the Kanawha Valley. Hudson estimates at least 1,000 people are buried there.



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In 1848, coal was discovered on the mountain opposite the Morris mansion, and a coal mine, the first in the Kanawha coal field, was established there by 1850. The first settlement in the immediate vicinity of the Morris mansion consisted of about 40 homes for coal miners and a store, all of which were built atop the mountain on which the coal mine was located. A forest fire destroyed that settlement, which later became known as Cannelton, but it was soon rebuilt on what is now known as Smithers Hill.

Slaves did all of the manual labor in the Cannelton coal mine from about 1850 until the outbreak of the Civil War. As a matter of fact, Col. Aaron Stockton, the first owner of the Cannelton mine, had 10 slaves in Fayette County in 1850. “Therefore, it is entirely possible that one or more of those unfortunate captives may be buried in the Lady Dunn Cemetery,” said Hudson.

After the Civil War, Morris Harvey began buying land fronting on Loup Creek and the New River. Dr. Frank J. Krebs, writing in his history of Morris Harvey College, wrote the following account of how Morris Harvey was able to acquire the property which later made him a very rich man: “Much of “old Man” Harvey’s wealth came for the coal fields of New River and Loup Creek. Farmers living in the area thought that the bluffs overlooking the rivers were worthless, so they refused to pay taxes on this land. They hired surveyors to run lines leaving off the cliffs of the gorge. Mr. Harvey purchased these worthless cliffs at sheriff’s sale and so became the owner of frontage on the New River and Loup Creek. Later on when the coal fields were developed, he controlled the entrances to the coal mines. Land purchased as delinquent tax land became the foundation of the Harvey wealth.”

Harvey next convinced the Covington and Ohio Railroad, which later became the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, to extend its tracks through the New River Gorge and on westward to Huntington, Krebs wrote. Krebs reported that Morris Harvey was extremely influential in bringing the railroad to the New River valley by, “Raising money through subscription to build the lines and by giving the railroad a right of way through his land.”

        

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