WARREN, Ohio – Details obscured by time at one of the Mahoning Valley’s oldest links to its past are now a bit clearer.
A new interactive digital mapping tool for Pioneer Cemetery provides “unprecedented access” to the historic burial ground, according to Savannah Moss, collections and research manager for the Trumbull County Historical Society.
The mapping tool can pinpoint gravesite locations that are accurate to within a couple of feet. It provides headstone locator tools, historical biographical records, satellite imagery overlay and mobile optimization for use by visitors who are at the site.
To access it, click HERE.
The historical society and Youngstown State University’s Center for Applied Geographic Information Systems teamed up for the project.
Pioneer Cemetery, located behind a structure at 661 Mahoning Ave., is the oldest burial place in Warren and is believed to be the oldest in the entire Western Reserve. It holds the remains of many of the area’s earliest settlers and Revolutionary War veterans, with the first recorded burial in 1804.
“Many of the earliest settlers in the area are there,” Moss said, including John Stark Edwards and Thomas Denny Webb.
Edwards was an attorney and landowner who was elected to the U.S. Congress but died of malaria before taking office.
Webb was an attorney who founded northern Ohio’s first newspaper and was twice elected to the state Senate.
The mapping project, more than a year in the making, transforms decades of historical records and recent fieldwork into an accessible public resource, Moss said.
It builds on years of preservation work. In 2023, TCHS received an Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board grant to digitize cemetery records from a 2003 survey. Those digitized records became the foundation for the GIS mapping initiative.
The fieldwork team – Pioneer intern India Gatts; TCHS staffers Moss and Kate Pfouts; and Martha Ellers intern Helena Meeks – spent hundreds of hours at the cemetery plotting GPS coordinates for every visible headstone, working through challenges posed by weathered and shifted markers.
When Warren was being settled by folks who were moving there from Connecticut, the area was considered “the wild frontier,” Moss said.
The earliest gravesites were given wooden markers, which degraded over time and were replaced with stone headstones, many of which are still in place.
No original plot map of the cemetery is known to exist. Moss believes that if one ever existed, it would have been destroyed by a fire at one of the past courthouse buildings that burned down.
But it’s likely that record keeping at the site was never a priority.
“Birth and death records weren’t required by the state of Ohio until the 1860s,” Moss said. “They were just kind of burying people where they needed to” in those days.
Pioneer Cemetery was founded in 1804 – one year after Ohio became a state.
It was abandoned several times during its more than 200 years of existence, and there has been recent vandalism there, Moss said.
When Oakwood Cemetery on Niles Road opened in 1848, Pioneer Cemetery went into disuse.
Natural causes have also added to the confusion over what is there and where it’s at.
“With the land shifting and changing, headstones have moved,” she said. “There have been trees that absorbed headstones, and a lot of different things, [including] essentially no money to continue taking care of it.”
Today, the cemetery is visited mainly by “history-minded people” and those who like spooky locations, especially around Halloween.
“It’s sometimes included as a stop on ghost walks,” Moss said. “But, also, it’s really peaceful and serene. It’s tucked away from the street, so it’s nice just to visit.”
The technical development of the new mapping tool was guided by John Bralich, director of YSU’s Center for Applied Geographic Information Systems. The center provides GIS mapping services to government, nonprofit and social service organizations throughout the region.
The cemetery is owned by the city.
The historical society’s next goal is to raise funds for a community headstone cleaning day at which volunteers will safely clean and preserve the cemetery’s historic markers. Information on how to get involved or support the project is available on the TCHS website.
Pictured at top: Pioneer Cemetery is located at the rear of a property along Mahoning Avenue in Warren.