BIT OF HISTORY: Long before even Harrison County was incorporated, the Yankee Ridgeway Cemetery was already providing a place where loved ones could be laid to rest. It was located along the old Point of Lorraine trail which, according to Yankee Ridge cemetery board president Carol Emry, “ran diagonally across the cemetery from northeast to southwest.” According to a 1993 article in the Bethany Republican-Clipper, there were “several people buried on this ridge”. They were probably homesteaders on their way to Kansas. Emry said “There was a spring one fourth of a mile east of the cemetery where they stopped to repair their wagons and rest their horses and get ready to go on.” There was also a post office where they could get their mail.
One man buried four sons in the cemetery after they passed away from diphtheria. According to Emry, the father was a stone mason. He went to the quarry and “hewed out head and foot stones and cut their initials in them”. Those gravesites can still be found in Yankee Ridge.
Yankee Ridge presumably got its name “from a group of English settlers who moved into the area just before the Civil War. Since the settlers were Union sympathizers, the trail became known as Yankee Ridge Road and the cemetery took the same name.” (Bethany Republican-Clipper, January 6, 1993)
