BARBEE FAMILY CEMETERY

Concord Twp., Miami Co., Ohio

DEDICATION OF THE WILLIAM BARBEE GRAVE MARKER HELD SEPTEMBER 20, 2008

following is the information from the invitation to the dedication

William Barbee was born September 14, 1759, at Culpepper County, Virginia, the son of John and Elizabeth Welch Barbee.

He served three years as a soldier in the Virginia Continental Line and was with George Washington the night he crossed the Delaware and at the Battle of Trenton.  He served at the siege of Yorktown in 1781 and fought in the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782.  He also was one of a party from Kentucky that went as far north to what is now Piqua, Ohio to fight Indians in 1782.

He received a warrant for land for his service in the Revolutionary War and relocated near Danville, Kentucky.  On February 20, 1781, he married Mary Smith in Lincoln County, Kentucky, and in 1804, they moved their family to Miami County, Ohio.

During the War of 1812, William Barbee served as the captain of a volunteer company that was raised on August 12, 1812, for the relief of Fort Wayne.  He then obtained a position in the Commissary Department in Piqua and remained there until his last sickness, when he returned to his home in Concord Township, where he died in September 1813.

The Barbee Family Cemetery is an early 19th century graveyard located on private property in Concord Township, Miami County, Ohio.  Neglected for decades, it was heavily overgrown.  Tradition held that Revolutionary War veteran William Barbee was buried here, but there was no marker and no known documentation of his burial site.

In 2006, Virginia Zimmerman, a member of Senior Girl Scout Troop 1292 and a past president of the Fort Pickawillany Society of the Revolution (C. A. R.), volunteered to clean up and research the cemetery as her Gold Award Project.  She organized a work crew of friends to help in the cemetery.  Today, she and two of her workers are dual members of the Fort Pickawillany Society C. A. R. and the Piqua-Lewis Boyer Chapter DAR.

To determine the cemetery's original boundaries, Virginia researched the deeds tracing the ownership of the land from the United States government to William Barbee to others up to the current owner.  Six deeds described the cemetery and the location of William Barbee's grave thereby providing proof of his burial site.

Rocky soil caused Virginia to replace her original plan to locate additional tombstones by probing within a grid within a grid system with digging in records to identify members of the Barbee family likely to have been buried in the cemetery.  She compiled the results of this family research, photographs and tombstone inscriptions, and the deeds into a 48-page self-published book, which she donated to the Troy Historical Society Library (Local History Library, 100 W. Main St., Troy) and the DAR in Washington DC.

Margaret, wife of William Barbee, Jr.  died April 17, 1849 in 60th year of age

Mary Tullis

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