
Trumbull County’s Connections
Special | 4m 43sVideo has Closed Captions
Did you know that American Revolutionary War veterans are buried in Warren, OH?
Did you know that American Revolutionary War veterans are buried in Warren, OH? Find out how many burial sites there are and their locations from experts at the Trumbull Historical Society.
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Western Reserve and the American Revolution is a local public television program presented by PBS Western Reserve

Trumbull County’s Connections
Special | 4m 43sVideo has Closed Captions
Did you know that American Revolutionary War veterans are buried in Warren, OH? Find out how many burial sites there are and their locations from experts at the Trumbull Historical Society.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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I'm going to go back to 1662 to talk a little bit about how this area sort of formed.
King Charles the Second of England actually started giving out land claims and to this area.
It was really important for people to move across the pond and it was sort of a race for this new land, this new world.
And the colony of Connecticut got a lot of this land.
And so before the Revolutionary War, Connecticut basically claimed that they owned as wide as their state is all the way to the sea.
And that was their claim until basically after the Revolutionary War.
- The real tie to the Revolutionary War for Trumbull County comes after the war.
And so we get then Connecticut having ties to this land here, developing the Connecticut Land Company, and then creating the Connecticut Western Reserve.
And so then we have these Revolutionary War veterans who are purchasing this land to then expand westward and create and have these land ties.
- The Connecticut Land Company was a syndicate of 35 purchasing groups, which comprised of about 57 to 58 wealthy individuals who purchased this land for $1.2 million.
The most famous or well known of those gentlemen was Moses Cleaveland.
However, we do have ties to some of these wealthy individuals.
Pierpont Edwards, like many people involved with the Connecticut Land Company and with Connecticut, was a Revolutionary War soldier himself.
He was the father of John Stark Edwards.
And we have the John Stark Edwards House here in Warren, Ohio.
Its biggest claim to fame is that it's the oldest remaining home in Warren.
It wasn’t the oldest home in Warren, but all the rest of it essentially been torn down.
And it was built in 1807.
It used to be on South Street.
It has moved twice.
The Tribune Chronicle wanted some more space, so they moved the house down a little bit.
And then eventually the house was suffering too much damage from road noise, you know, cars driving by, things like that.
So in the 80s, the house was moved to Monroe Street, where it now rests.
A lot of the ties to the Revolutionary War was people who purchased land through the Connecticut Land Company, or were promised land, and then they moved to the area.
A lot of the earliest settlers of Trumbull County, colonial settlers, were veterans of the Revolutionary War.
- Ohio became a state in 1803, but Warren was founded in 1798.
Even before Ohio became really nationally significant, you get these places being founded by settlers and especially like Revolutionary War veterans.
- 1798 is when Ephraim Quimby purchased 441 acres of land from the Connecticut Land Company to develop Warren, and he named it after the surveyor Moses Warren, not Moses Cleaveland.
- Pioneer Cemetary was developed in 1804.
The land was given by Henry Leon Jr, whose father was actually a revolutionary War veteran who purchased land here in Warren.
He donated part of the land to become the first cemetery in Warren.
And so it was meant to be a temporary burial ground.
They called it Pioneer Cemetery.
It's also been referred to as Old Mahoning Cemetery, and it's located on Mahoning Avenue here in Warren, Ohio.
The first burial was in 1804 with Sara Fitch Agate, whose husband was a Revolutionary War veteran named John Agate.
And so John Adgate and his wife Sarah had been some of the first founders and settlers in Howland Township here in Trumbull County.
So Pioneer Cemetery has around 19 Revolutionary War veterans in Trumbull County as a whole.
We know there's about 200 if we count in Mahoning County, which was also a little bit of part of Trumbull County until 1846 or so.
We're looking at probably closer to 400 Revolutionary War veterans in the area.
Being able to make these connections allows for people, especially kids who are in the classroom and learning about these things, and they're like, what does this have to do with me?
And they get to learn that they have local ties here.
So often we forget that local history isn't just local, it ties into on a national level.
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