Many visitors to Forest Home Cemetery want to know where the oldest grave is. The answer is a complicated one. Of course, Native Americans used the land along the Des Plaines as burial grounds for centuries before Europeans arrived, but very little remains of what was once approximately 10 acres of native burial grounds.
Muddling the matter further, we know that the first non-Native American buried with a headstone predates the cemetery by close to 20 years. In 1854, Ferdinand Haase, who at the time was using the land as a farm, buried his brother-in-law, Carl Zimmerman, on top of an existing Native American burial mound. Complicating it further, Zimmerman does not have the earliest date listed on a headstone in the cemetery.
Beneath the impressive Stannard monument lay 10 members of the Gaylord, Gilbert, and Stannard families. Captain William “Billy” Gaylord (1779-1820), who rests at the monument, was born in Connecticut in October 1779. (The date on his headstone incorrectly says he was born in 1780.) Captain Gaylord was a shipwright and one of the first ship captains on Lake Erie, where he had a freight and passenger business based in Cleveland, Ohio. He died at the age of 40 from an illness that began on board his schooner the American Eagle. His birth date appears to be that of the earliest non-Native American buried in the cemetery, but Captain Gaylord wasn’t originally buried here. This is his fourth resting place. Captain Gaylord was first buried in the Cleveland City Cemetery, but six years later, when that cemetery closed (it was Cleveland’s first), his body was moved to a family plot in the Erie Street cemetery, also located in Cleveland. Then, in 1908, he was relocated to Forest Home on the west side of the river, and then finally, in 1950, he was interred on the east side of the river where he now rests…