Wesleyan Cemetery

Wesleyan Cemetery sits along Colerain Avenue in Cincinnati's Northside (historically Cumminsville). The Methodist Episcopal Church purchased the original twenty-five-acre tract in 1843 after its downtown burial ground behind Wesley Chapel had filled. From its founding, Wesleyan accepted both Black and white burials, making it the first racially integrated cemetery in Hamilton County — a status that mattered enormously in pre-Civil War Cincinnati, an Ohio River city where laws and customs around race were sharply enforced.

That integrated status is what made Wesleyan central to one of the most documented Underground Railroad rescues in the region. In April 1853, the white abolitionist John Fairfield led twenty-eight freedom-seekers from the area around Lawrenceburg, Indiana across the Ohio River and into Cincinnati. To move them through the city in daylight without arousing suspicion, Fairfield disguised the group as a funeral procession bound for Wesleyan Cemetery in Cumminsville — a credible destination precisely because Wesleyan accepted Black burials when other cemeteries did not. From Wesleyan the group was passed to the home of Levi Coffin, the famed Underground Railroad stationmaster, and eventually onward toward Canada. The episode is preserved as the 'Escape of the 28' and was added to the National Park Service's Network to Freedom in 2014.

Wesleyan also holds a significant population of Black Civil War veterans and Cincinnati's nineteenth-century abolitionist community. The cemetery fell into a long period of neglect during the twentieth century — the academic monograph 'The Cemetery Nobody Wanted' chronicles its century of disputed ownership before it formally became part of the City of Cincinnati in 1953 — but it remains in active use, with the city now responsible for maintenance.

A separate strand of local memory ties the cemetery to the 1900 Salvation Army Orphanage fire on Front Street in downtown Cincinnati, in which seven children died. According to local lore captured by Cincinnati's preservation community, those children were buried at Wesleyan with a marker; the children's marker is the focal point of the cemetery's modern ghost stories.