While clearing an overgrown field, a Copley Township landowner has unearthed a mystery that goes beyond the grave.
Huce Beach Jr., 70, of Akron, discovered a 19th century headstone buried in underbrush on the 1.8-acre tract that has belonged to his family for at least 60 years. The marble slab was meant to mark the final resting place of prominent Akron businessman William D. Stevens (1819-1886).
But Stevens is buried in a family plot at Glendale in Akron, according to cemetery records. How did his original headstone get in Copley? Is anyone buried in that field? Beach would like some answers before he starts digging.
Beach, who retired after 42 years at Goodyear and 28 years as a Summit County sheriff’s deputy, started clearing the Wright Road property about three years ago when it was a tangled jungle of out-of-control vegetation. The thick canopy of trees, bushes and weeds must have been about 10 feet high before he started cutting it down. Beach has big plans for the land.
“I want to clear it and start a community garden out here,” Beach said. “I want to put a building up and some greenhouses. I want to get in touch with the schools … to have kids out and let them know that the food that they eat, the vegetables and stuff, they don’t grow them in the store.”
Once he gets the property in shape, Beach plans to form a nonprofit group to apply for a grant to help him realize his goal.
He gets his love of the land from his father, Huce Beach Sr., who used to plant gardens there. The elder Beach bought the property in 1974 after his sister and brother-in-law Alma and Charles Wallace lost their home in a fire and moved out of Copley.
“He used to grow food, and he would just give it to people,” Beach recalled with a laugh. “When people asked him, ‘How did you grow the food?’ he said, ‘All I do is put it in the ground and let the good Lord take care of the rest.’ ”
Beach and a work crew from the Urban League have been hacking away at the dense bushes, and the tract is finally getting manageable. They have found old bottles, rugs and tires, but the latest discovery is a puzzler.
“It was really overgrown back there,” Beach said. “Once we started to clear that, then I noticed a rock on the ground. I couldn’t tell what it was because it was overgrown. Once I cleared the growth from around it, then I could see it was a headstone. And so I said, ‘How did this headstone get out here? I hope the guy’s not under it, you know?’ ”
Beach called Akron-Summit County Public Library where Mary Plazo, a librarian in the Special Collections Division, found information about William D. Stevens. The African-American barber was a well-known businessman who dared to open a shop in the 1850s on Main Street, where the Pennsylvania & Ohio Canal ran down the middle, instead of the established business district of Howard Street.
Born in 1819 in Winchester, Va., Stevens was whisked away to Zanesville as an infant. According to an 1891 Summit County atlas: “A touching incident in this connection, illustrating a mother’s love, is the fact that notwithstanding he was a free child, his devoted mother fearing that he might be torn from her and placed in bondage, determined to prevent such a calamity, and with that she ran away, bearing her babe in safety after enduring many hardships, to Ohio.”
Stevens learned the barber trade in Auburn, N.Y., married Mary Jane Freeman (1827-1853) in 1845 and moved to Akron in 1850. Their daughter Catherine died of edema at age 2 in 1851 and Mary died of tuberculosis two years later. Stevens married Massillon resident Minerva Davis (1836-1924) in 1855 and they had three children: George (1860-1940), Mary (1862-1912) and Grant (1869-1942).
When the barber died of a stroke at age 66 on Jan. 27, 1886, the Akron Daily Beacon published a lengthy eulogy: “In the death of William D. Stevens at his home, 169 South Main Street, this morning, the colored people of Akron have lost their worthiest and best known member; the community in general are deprived of a good citizen, who was always on the side of intelligence and progress, and his family mourn a good husband and father, one whose seeming sternness had in it kindness and wisdom.”
Stevens was credited with helping establish Main Street as a main street, lobbying for the removal of the defunct canal and the expansion of the commercial district.
“In business, the deceased had a straightforwardness that would bless the world if there were more of it,” the Beacon noted. “His word was literally as good as his bond, and while he insisted upon having his own, he was equally exact in doing whatever was his due.”
Glendale’s records say Stevens is buried next to his two wives and baby daughter. Their granite headstones resemble curved scrolls, unlike the rectangular stone found in the Copley field.
“I have no idea why it would be here,” Beach said.
Looking at property records, he hasn’t been able to determine if any Stevens descendants ever owned the land. At least one of them was quite prosperous.
William Stevens’ son George was a chief engineer at Portage Strawboard Co. and served as the first fire chief of Barberton before becoming an executive at an Indiana paper company. In 1930, he established a $651,057 benevolent fund in Akron that has grown to $1.4 million today at the Akron Community Foundation.
Beach plans to keep the 1886 headstone until he finds out if there are any descendants who want to reclaim it. If anyone knows about any old graves off Wright Road, he wouldn’t mind knowing that, too.
“I’m assuming there’s nobody there, but you never know,” Beach said. “I haven’t done anything to the ground but sweep the debris away. I want to find out before I start digging back there.”
Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price is the author of the book Lost Akron from The History Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.