Pioneer Cemetery - Evans Center Cemetery, Evans New York

Date added: October 16, 2023 Categories:

Looking west toward North Main from roughly near the center of the cemetery (2011)

The Pioneer Cemetery is associated with the settlement, development and history of the Town of Evans and the hamlet of Evans Center, one of the earliest settlement-era communities in the town. Many of the town's prominent early settlers are buried in this cemetery, and the site provides information about their lives, marriages, deaths and interrelationships. The cemetery follows the common early settlement burial ground pattern of a small parcel with burials in rows running north to south with the interments oriented east to west. Several markers display period iconography and a handful of family obelisk-style monuments are scattered throughout the site. In addition to the burials of many early settlement-era families, the cemetery includes at least three veterans of the American Revolution, as well as a number of veterans from the Civil War. Another significant burial is of Asa Ames, an important mid-nineteenth-century American folk artist whose work has been featured in a number of museum exhibitions. Asa Ames was known for his unusual wood-carved sculptures that were featured in a 2008 exhibit at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City.

Settlement in what became the Town of Evans began around the turn of the nineteenth century when easterners began to venture west to purchase lands from the Holland Land Company. The first settler in the town was Joel Harvey, who built a log house in 1804 at the mouth of Eighteen Mile Creek at the northern edge of the town. As more settlers arrived, he converted the cabin into a hotel known as the Frontier House. By 1810, a community began to form in the vicinity of Evans Center. These early newcomers included Anderson Taylor, Nathaniel Lay, Daniel Cash, Elijah Gates, John Barker, and Sanford Bundy. In 1811, the Ayers family moved to the area followed by Hezekiel Dibble and his son Orange; Gideon Dudley and his son William; David Corbin, Timothy Dustin and a Mr. Pike.

Settlement steadily increased especially after the end of the War of 1812. A sawmill was built in Evans Center by William Wright and Henry Tuttle in 1815. They built a gristmill in the same vicinity in 1816. These mills were a boon to development, as they facilitated processing lumber for homes and allowed local farmers a nearby place to grind their grain. In this early time period, the settlement was known as Wright's Mills, in recognition of the mills' importance. Another early business was the National Hotel, located on the Erie Road (Route 5) in the hamlet.

By 1821, local residents petitioned for the right of self-government and the Town of Evans was established. The new town took its name from David E. Evans, an agent for the Holland Land Company and nephew of Joseph Ellicott, who was the chief surveyor and primary land agent for the Holland Purchase, which included all of Western New York and part of Pennsylvania. The Wright's Mills area was officially renamed Evans Center, as it was approximately the geographic center of the new township. William Wright's house in Evans Center was designated as the town hall and voting place. The name of the post office, which had been Eden, was officially changed to Evans.

Evans Center remained the major population center of the town for many decades. Many merchants located there and other businesses included a marble store, saw and grist mills, a post office, and a carpenter shop. In the 1820s, Boyer's Hotel joined the National Hotel. A tannery opened on Big Sister Creek by the grist mill on south west edge of the hamlet. The Evans School Number 2 was located at the intersection of Erie Road and Old Evans Center Road, was built in 1857.

An 1866 atlas of the hamlet shows a number of residences and businesses located in Evans Center, as well as Baptist, Methodist, and Congregationalist churches. The business directory identifies W. Earl, a manufacturer and dealer in flour and feed; James Brodie, a tanner and currier and leather dealer; Charles Gates, a marble dealer; H. Marvin, a market gardener, two miles north of Evans; and James West, the proprietor of the National Hotel. By this time, a burial ground had been established on North Main Street and many of these families bought plots in the cemetery.

In 1852, the Buffalo and State Line Rail Road, later part of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Rail Road, was built through the Town of Evans. The station was located south of Evans Center and was named Evans Station. Population shifted around the station and it became the new center for the town. Businesses and even buildings from Evans Center were relocated to be nearer the rail station, and the era of Evans Center's prominence was over. Evans Station eventually became the Village of Angola.

Located in the south end of Evans Center, the cemetery had its first burial in 1810. The death of the young child Sawyer Barrell, necessitated the establishment of a burial ground on a portion of a privately owned piece of land on North Main Street. In 1844, the land was deeded to the Town of Evans. An 1866 atlas shows a Methodist Church and parsonage as being adjacent to the cemetery, but neither building is extant. Although churches were often associated with cemeteries, no documentation survives showing a direct connection between the cemetery and the church properties.

Also buried in the cemetery was Anderson Taylor who arrived in Evans Center in 1810 and built his home in the vicinity. Another family found in the cemetery was the Ayers family, originally from Haverhill, Massachusetts. James and Sarah Bradley Ayers arrived in Evans Center in 1811 with seven of their eight children: Gorham, Lowe, Martha, Mary, Sarah, Henrietta, and Ira. Their youngest, named James after his father, was born in Evans, and was believed to have been the first white male born in the town. James and his older brother, Ira, were instrumental in raising the New York State 116^th Regiment Company A and Company K of volunteers who enlisted to fight for the Union during the Civil War. James died in the Confederate Prisoner of War camp at Baton Rouge, Louisiana on May 12^th, 1863. His parents James and Sarah, were buried in the Pioneer Cemetery, and family records of the Ayers family indicate that four of the children were also buried there. Ancestors of Willis Carrier, the inventor of air conditioning, were also memorialized in the cemetery. Three of the persons buried in the cemetery have been documented as Revolutionary War veterans, one of these being Corporal John Frost who was better known as Deacon Frost. At least ten burials contain veterans of the Civil War.

Perhaps the most notable person buried in the cemetery was Asa Ames, a local folk artist recognized for his talent as a carver of wood sculptures. Ames was born in Evans in 1824 and lived his entire life in the town. He died in 1850 at the age of 27, seven months and seven days, as was recorded on his gravestone. During his brief, four-year artistic career, he was known to have carved thirteen wooden sculptures that were largely portraits of family members and friends. His earliest known sculpture was created in 1847 and his portraiture was similar in style to other nineteenth-century folk portraits, with the exception that they were three-dimensional carvings rather than paintings. He completed a life-size full-length carving of his niece, Susan Ames, in 1849 (now in the permanent collection at the Boulder History Museum). Other pieces became part of the collection of the New York State Historical Society in Cooperstown, New York; the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, New York; the Huntington Art Museum in Huntington, West Virginia; the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia; and, the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut.

Perhaps Ames's most unusual piece is a portrait of a young girl now owned by the American Folk Art Museum. The girl has a brightly colored head depicting the thirty-seven phrenological areas of the skull, which are colored a different hue and labeled following a popular phrenological map of the human head. Developed as a pseudoscience in Germany in the late eighteenth century, phrenology was popularized in America in the mid-nineteenth century by the brothers Orson Squire and Lorenzo Niles Fowler. According to practitioners, different areas of the head were supposed to correspond to specific behaviors, attitudes or morals or physical characteristics. A local Evans doctor, Dr. Harvey Marvin, was a proponent of phrenology, as well as other popular beliefs, such as spiritualism and the water cure (hydropathy). Ames was living in Dr. Marvin's household at the time of the 1850 Census and it was at this time that he executed this phrenology map. His work was highly regarded for its skill and for being highly detailed, especially for his attention to the drapery and texture clothing. The carvings were painted in rich colors, adding to their appeal and unique quality. Many of his portraits were of young children with the most ambitious piece being a statue of a young girl shown symbolically with a lamb and a salver, completed in the year of his death. The figure was done as a memorial for two young sisters from Evans Center, Sarah Reliance Ayer, and Ann Augusta Ayer, who died in 1849 at age one and age three, respectively.

Many of the details of Ames's short life were unknown, making his past open to speculation. It was suggested that he may have learned his craft as an apprentice carver of ships' figureheads, since his work resembled such carvings. However, his portraits exhibited a distinct artistic style. Ames himself was thought to have viewed himself as an artist. He had his profession listed as sculpturing in the 1850 U.S. Census. Furthermore, most folk artists left pieces unsigned and undated, but Ames both signed and dated all of his pieces. His documented works included carvings of Millard T. Dewey (1847, private collection); Maria Dewey (1847, current location unknown; exhibited in 1931 at the Newark Museum); Adelaide Dewey (1847, lost in a fire); Amanda Clayanna Armstrong (1847, private collection); Bust of a Young Man (1847, New York Historical Society); Bust of a Young Man (c. 1847-1851, Huntington Art Museum); Bust of a Woman (c. 1847-1851, collection of the Regis Corporation); Bust of a Young Woman (c. 1847-1851, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum); Girl Holding a Book (c. 1847-1851, private collection); Susan Ames Hogue (1849, Boulder History Museum); Naked Child (1849, private collection); Sarah Reliance Ayer and Ann Augusta Ayer Memorial (1850, Wadsworth Athenaeum); and Phrenological Head (c.1850, American Folk Art Museum).

The work of Asa Ames was the subject of several publications and art exhibits. An exhibition of his work at the American Folk Art Museum in 2008 was entitled "Asa Ames: Occupation Sculpturing," and was organized by a senior curator who stated: "Although details of Ames's history remain shrouded in shadow, the work of his hands illuminates the meaningful and personal nature of the lives he captured so beautifully in wood." As the New York Times article also stated that "Ames's inspirations clearly included the portraits that itinerant painters were making during this period, but translating these wonderfully stiff, often emotionally fraught images into three dimensions gives them an added sense of life. The best of them have the artifice and complexity of nineteenth-century photographs." In addition to revealing his artistry, the works of Asa Ames also documented some of the people he knew and saw daily in Evans, New York, some being buried in the Pioneer Cemetery. Although only a handful of carvings portrayed members of the community, the cemetery itself remains a record of Evan's early history.

Site Description

Pioneer Cemetery, also known as the Evans Center Cemetery, is located in the hamlet of Evans Center in the Town of Evans, south of the City of Buffalo in Erie County, New York. Evans Center is north of the Village of Angola and east of Route 5 in the lakeshore area, east of Lake Erie west of the NYS Thruway. The cemetery is located on the west side of North Main Street between the intersections of Gold Street and Beach Road. The cemetery is a small, rectangular parcel approximately, slightly less than one acre in size, which fronts directly on North Main Street. It contains ten to eleven rows of burials, aligned north to south. The graves themselves follow the traditional orientation of east to west with most of the grave markers facing west away from the roadway. The cemetery is surrounded by residences to the north and south and woods to the west. A church and a senior apartment complex are located across North Main Street from the property. There are some mature trees along the edge of the roadway, but the cemetery is quite visible from North Main Street.

The cemetery is characterized by hilly terrain, with a prominent rise at the center gradually dropping to the north, south, and west. The site is somewhat overgrown, with small bushes and grasses. It is attractively treed with mature deciduous trees and volunteers have recently planted new ornamental trees. A number of older trees along the road frontage have recently been removed, which provides clearer sight lines into the property from the road. The site is rustic and naturalistic, with no formal plantings. There are no pathways or formal circulation features in the cemetery. A tall flagpole is located approximately in the center of the property, at the top of the tallest hill. The site is not fenced and there are no structures on the property.

Many of the town's prominent early residents are buried in the cemetery. Graves are generally located in uneven north-south rows, with the earliest graves at the center. An inventory of names at the cemetery prepared by historical society volunteers lists approximately 300 names. Grave markers range from individuals, some with more than one person, memorial and family monuments with headstones and footstones. The earliest grave dates from the founding of Evans Center in 1810. This belongs to Sawyer Barrell, the two-year-old son of one of the early settlers. Burials continued into the early twentieth century, with the last being in 1928. This was the burial of Loren Avery, a descendant of one of the town's founding families. Most of the burials occurred between the early to mid-nineteenth century, with the largest number of interments dating from the 1850s. A small percentage of the burials are undated, due to the dates being absent or illegible. The majority of the burials that have dates indicated are from 1810 through the 1860s.

The majority of graves are marked with simple tablet headstones, either rectangular or domed in shape. Many of the stones are simply engraved with the names and dates of the deceased. Others are decorated with willows and other period iconography. Many of the burials also have small footstones, especially those associated with family monuments. Six of these monuments are large obelisks on square bases and have the inscriptions for all family members interred in the plot. Of the oldest markers, many are extremely weathered marble or sandstone, making the inscriptions difficult to read. A large number of the gravestones have fallen, are cracked or have other damage (chips, fractured surfaces, mold, etc). There are a smaller number of late nineteenth-century graves of more durable granite.