Wanting to explore historical places of Niagara County this summer, I hopped in my car and started driving to look for some places that were indicated on the Niagara Historic Trail. I ended up at what used to be the St. Paul’s Dutch – German Reformed Church on at 7264 Akron Rd in the Town of Lockport.
The original Niagara Historic Trail published in 1976 simply stated “an old cemetery” and didn’t mention the church at all. When the Niagara Historic Trail was updated in 2008, more information was shared: “The brick building at 7264 Akron Rd. was a church, built in 1849 to replace a wooden structure build on this location in 1830. The Congregation went through several changes before merging with the English Lutheran Church in Lockport. The building has been a residence since the late 1920s. The cemetery that is east of the brick building contains the remains of many residents of that area, with the first burial appearing to have been in 1815.”1
The church has been converted to an auto junk yard business now called Gothard Auto Wrecking.
The Niagara County Historian’s Office has letters and notes in their folder for this cemetery (25-04-0018) where past historian, Clarence O. Lewis, tried to locate information from the Lutheran Synod about the cemetery in 1951 without much luck. Within those same 1951 notes, he said that the cemetery had been, sadly, desecrated and he was trying to have the town take action with the homeowner to clean up the property.
In 1983, Dorothy Rolling and Don Jerge conducted a tombstone reading and found that the cemetery was in very poor condition and a field of tall grass. They stated that most of the stones were down with about ten of them being in a pile.
Here is the cemetery on Find a Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2682504/sa-int-pauls-dutch-german-reformed-cemetery
Located to the left of the church’s driveway is the cemetery. Here is what it looks like today:
If the stones were found in a pile in the 1980s, it is likely that they are not placed now where they might have originally been placed. It would be nice to try to find obituaries for those buried there and make sure that their profiles have been built up on the FamilySearch Family Tree to help them be remembered for generations to come.
