By RON INGRAM
Herald & Review Staff Writer
August 10, 2006

DECATUR, ILLINOIS - David Carroll of Tinley Park recently visited Decatur's Greenwood Cemetery looking for a bit of history, something the old burial ground has in abundance.

Carroll was seeking the grave of Edward A. Barnwell, who earned a measure of lasting fame on May 9, 1860, when Abraham Lincoln came to his photographic studio at 24 N. Water St. from the nearby Wigwam, where the Republican convention was taking place. Barnwell took a photograph of Lincoln the day before he was nominated to run for president.

Decatur Township Cemeteries Superintendent John Simroth showed Carroll and his mother, Helen, the Barnwell family plot. There, the photographer, his wife, Susannah, his daughter, Grace, and two other family members are interred. Headstones for two of the graves have weathered so badly they are unreadable.

One of the incongruities raised by the visit was the first name of Barnwell's wife, which an obituary in the April 15, 1899, Decatur Daily Republican listed as "Sarah."

"I'm doing a book on photographing Abraham Lincoln in Illinois," Carroll said. "It will consist of every photo taken of Lincoln in the state and biographies of the photographers. Those people are all but forgotten."

A print of Barnwell's Lincoln photograph is the property of the Decatur Public Library, along with a glass positive thought to have been made from the print. Carroll said the library had denied him permission to view the photograph, though copies are available elsewhere.

During his travels throughout the state researching the book, Carroll said he has found one Lincoln photographer buried in an unmarked grave in Oak Ridge Cemetery, Springfield, where Lincoln's body rests, and another in a badly vandalized grave in a small Jewish cemetery in Chicago.

Decatur Township Clerk Arthur Lee Walker, who oversees township cemetery operations, pointed to Carroll's inquiry as one of many that Simroth receives each year from people looking for relatives or someone of historical significance.

The township recently has been working to make sure its three cemeteries continue to be well maintained, with Greenwood as the centerpiece with its 104 acres of rolling hills and large oak trees.

"We want to get together a pamphlet or something similar with a little of its history that we can give to people who visit the community and the cemetery," Walker said.

Besides being the resting place of most of Decatur's notable citizens of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the cemetery holds relatives of famous people such as the grandmother of the late comedian, Richard Pryor, Walker said.
Greenwood Cemetery formally came into existence on March 3, 1857, when the Decatur Greenwood Cemetery Association was incorporated. However, burials at the site long predated the association's founding.


One marker that was barely discernable in 1978 when a Herald & Review story was written about the cemetery was that of William Pratt, who died April 10, 1811, at the age of 10 years and seven months. That grave may have come about when the "Common Burial Grounds" in the 1000 block of West Main Street were closed in 1839 and the bodies reburied in Greenwood.

The cemetery association was dissolved in 1958, when the township took over operation of Greenwood.

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