From the Curia Extension Homemaker's Club Sesquicentennial report on Cedar Grove. Not copyrighted.


"Very few things have spurred the imagination in Cedar Grove more than the large rocked grave that stands in the lwoer portion of the the Cedar Grove Cemetery. People have questioned the origin and it's inhabitant for years. The expertly constructed object belongs to a thirteen year old boy, named William E. Evitt, who died one very cold day, nearly one hundred years ago.

William has been buried in the beautiful grove of cedar trees since approximately 1890, but his grave is still the most outstanding in the area. The story handed down from son to son goes that the Evitt family came here with a wagon train headed 'somewhere', but stayed in Cedar Grove. Will's father, Nehemiah, was one of the earliest church members and a blacksmith. In 1870, he and his wife had four children. In the winter of 1890, it was particularly cold and during this time, young William came down with pneumonia and died. The ground was frozen hard and the men were only able to little more than scratch the surface when digging the grave. It is speculated that this was the reason they built a grave cover.

However modest William's funeral might have been, his gravestones are first class. It would have taken great skill to cut the stones so precisely and then carve such a huge cover stone for the top. To further testify to an expert's hand, set in the middle of the front wall, cut in a large stone is the incscriptoin, "William E. Evitt, In Loving Memory". Surely the craftsmanship came about from the skills of his blacksmith father. But whoever built it, ..a hundred years later, the entire monument is still in tact."