This cemetery has a long history. Today, Snoddy Road curves slightly to avoid the area in which the grave markers stand. The first burials, from 1837 to 1853, were for four members of the Kelsey family. At some point between 1919 and 1928, Thomas Boston Kelsey visited the cemetery; he and his parents had moved in 1859 from Monroe County, Indiana, and the vicinity of the family burial place, to Berea, Kansas. Upon his visit, Thomas found the road adjoining the cemetery had been widened and cut down nearly two yards beneath the surface of the adjoining fields. The graves of his sister, brother, aunt and grandmother appeared to be washing from their roadside shoulder area onto the road. It was after his visit that the county erected a concrete retaining wall to preserve the graves.
Thomas Boston Kelsey grandparents, Hugh & Margaret Mills Kelsey, immigrated with their parents to America prior to the Revolutionary War and their families settled in South Carolina. Hugh came from Ireland and Margaret from Scotland and they married in 1780. Thomas Boston Kelsey wrote a family history in 1914-1915, entitled "Our Family Record: The Story of the Kelseys, Services, Cunninghams and Spencers in Their Relationship to My Children" from which some of this information has come. Thomas writes that in 1836, his parents, grandmother, and other family members moved and settled in Monroe County, Indiana, having come from South Carolina. The chief reason for the move was to escape the Negro slave system that existed in South Carolina. They were farmers and raised their crops and animals on their new land in Monroe County.
The site of the Associates Church is thought by some, to be a short distance east of the graveyard, where in 1939, scattered foundation stones were still in evidence. Besides the four Kelseys buried in this cemetery, it is thought that the cemetery contained numerous other graves for relatives of the Kelsey family and members of the Associates Church congregation, who died in the last half of the 1800‘s. Descendants of the area's residents, such as George W. Rogers who lived a half mile from the cemetery, recall that many years ago, well before 1939, a number of graves were opened and their contents taken to the Presbyterian burial place on West 7th Street in Bloomington, Indiana. Thus it would appear that the only remaining burials belonged to the four original Kelsey family members.
More recently, the land on which the cemetery is located has been owned by John Walbridge III. The cemetery is situated in his front yard and is maintained. He and his family are now using the cemetery for their own family burials, giving the old cemetery new meaning and purpose. Snoddy Road still curves to avoid the cemetery and the four original burials have survived. Visitors to the cemetery are welcome to pull into the driveway of the property, on which the cemetery is located, to park their car.
[Information from an article in the Bloomington Daily Telephone newspaper, issue of Tuesday, October 24, 1939; courtesy of John Walbridge III]