The Monroe County History Center has volumes of data on local cemeteries and other information on Monroe Lake.
(Clayton Baumgarth - WFIU/WTIU)
The construction of the Monroe Lake Reservoir was controversial from the start.
The project was designed to create a source of drinking water for Bloomington and to prevent flooding downstream. The power of eminent domain was used to acquire properties and even the entire town of Elkinsville when construction began in 1960.
As part of the relocation process, the Army Corps of Engineers had to move eight cemeteries.
But were there any graves left untouched and forgotten for the last 60 years?
According to Megan MacDonald, research librarian at the Monroe County History Center, thorough documentation provided by the Corps of Engineers shows success in finding and moving seven of the eight gravesites.
“When they were looking for the eighth cemetery, which was known as Cutright cemetery, they couldn't find anything there,” she said. “The next of kin that was associated with that land said that they heard it was there, and they couldn't find where it was themselves.”
This poster at the Monroe County History Center shows the estimated location of Cutright Cemetery and others nearby. Clayton Baumgarth - WFIU/WTIU
Family lore said Cutright Cemetery was an unmarked burial site for family members on ancestral farmland.
When the family couldn’t locate the cemetery, contractors used specialized equipment to search for the bodies. Their efforts also came up empty.
“After everyone did their due diligence, the family just kind of decided it must have just been family lore that was passed down through generations,” she said. “So they had the experts looking for the cemeteries, they had the family looking for the graves where they thought they would maybe be and nothing came up.”
Adding to the mystery is a photo the Monroe County History Center has of what is supposed to be Cutright Cemetery, lending credence to its existence.
“There is a photo we have of where the cemetery was, and you can't make out anything at all versus the other photos where you're like, ‘okay, yes, there definitely is a fence here,’ or we can see some headstones or there's a depression in the ground,” she said.
The photo from the Monroe County History Center of Cutright Cemetary. Devan Ridgway - WFIU/WTIU
Cutright Cemetery wasn’t the only case of bodies not being located through the move, though; of the nearly 400 bodies identified for relocation, the Corp of Engineers documented moving just over 300.
While it seems likely that there are bodies still under the lake, MacDonald said it’s most likely the only thing that remains of the old towns and houses.
“People ask ‘is it true that there's like, actual buildings under there?’ No, they moved the families, they displaced them and they razed everything,” she said. “There's not like, a church steeple that you're going to touch when you're swimming or anything like that.”
To learn more about the relocation process, and hopefully determine who is under the lake, we spoke with Curtis Sylvester, president of the Indiana Genealogical Society. He said the confusion may be due to the way people handled their dead in the early 1900s.
“You've got to recognize that when Monroe County was created, we had all these farms,” he said. “And when grandma died, they didn't often go anyplace off the farm, they just buried her on the farm, ‘out there under the Big Apple Tree, let's put grandma,’ and they put a pile of rocks and everybody knew that was grandma until they forgot it. So I would assume that all over the United States, there are unmarked graves.”
But as it turns out, Sylvester was more connected to this story than originally expected.
“When you sent an info question to the Genealogical Society wanting more information, they referred it to me to saying, ‘Do you know anything about this?’ and I said, ‘actually I do, they're asking about my relatives.’”
Sylvester is related to people directly affected by the creation of Lake Monroe. On one side of his family are the Wamplers. They were relocated to Allen’s Creek Cemetery, where they rest today.
One of Sylvester's relatives, now resting in Allen Creek Cemetery. Clayton Baumgarth - WFIU/WTIU
When moving them to their new final resting place, Sylvester’s father and aunt witnessed the exhumation. Sylvester described the process of how the diggers, African-American tobacco workers from North Carolina, would dig down to the wooden casket and begin using small trowels once they got close.
“My father said that he was standing there watching all of this, and they found a pair of boots from my great grandpa,” he said. “And so they dug around them and when they lifted him up to the surface to put them in the casket, the air hit the boots and they just disintegrated and blew away and dust.”
On the other side of his lineage are the Cutrights, who likely remain buried under Lake Monroe.
“They didn't remember where they buried grandma and grandpa,” he said. “They looked and could not find them. So as far as anybody knows, Grandma and Grandpa are underwater.”
Sylvester posited that the Cutright State Recreation Area, a campsite and boat launching area right next to the lake, is a portion of his family’s old farm that didn’t end up underwater.
By tracing his lineage through public documents, Sylvester found the names of six relatives who remain under the lake: Sylvester’s third-great grandparents Robert and Jeriah Cutright, their son Gabriel, and other relatives Hannah, Robert and William Cutright. Robert is listed as being born in 1778.
The only known photo of Robert Cutright (middle). The other individuals are unknown. Courtesy of Curt Sylvester, Devan Ridgway - WFIU/WTIU
He traced that part of the family as far back as he could.
“I traced them back to where their original name as far back as I could find was Cortes, and my DNA shows that I have Spanish DNA,” he said. “And so the Cutright family were originally Cortes from Spain.”
He said they were affected by the Spanish Inquisition. "They escaped one night according to their diaries and walked across France to Belgium and from Belgium eventually ended up in Monroe County," he said.
Sylvester has a lot of pride in his family and Bloomington’s heritage and said that more people should become familiar their family history.
“It's a great heritage and today, people don't think that's important, but I think knowing who you are, where you came from is really important for me,” he said.
So are there people still buried under Lake Monroe? Yes, and thanks to the work of historians, some of their names continue to live on.
