The stone receiving vault Guilford built after the grave robbers of 1844

Brothers David and John Wilson arrived in 1816 from the east and cleared land in northeastern Guilford Township. The area became known as Wilson's Corners.¹ On December 15, 1818, David Wilson married Abigail Porter. It was the first recorded marriage in the township.

In 1821, Abigail's grandfather Elijah Porter, a Revolutionary War veteran born December 12, 1757, died shortly after arriving to join the family. The Wilsons buried him in a small graveyard beside their clearing. It was the first burial there.²

Twenty-three years later, in 1844, something ugly happened. Perrin's 1881 county history records it plainly: “there having been several cases of grave-robbing, the citizens constructed quite a large receiving vault.” The bodies were being sold to medical schools in Cleveland.³ The vault they built was about 10 by 18 feet, 8 feet high, of stone, with an iron gate. It was, per Perrin, “the only one of the kind in Guilford Township.”

The vault is still there. The iron gate was vandalized decades ago and eventually restored in 2017 by a Wadsworth blacksmith named Joe Garn as part of a volunteer cleanup led by Charlie Selzer and Tammy Collins. The cemetery association had been dissolved in 2005; the township took stewardship.⁴

The hamlet's name changed in 1828 when the post office arrived. Wilson's Corners became River Styx, after the mythological Greek river that divides the world of the living from the world of the dead. Some settlers made a joke of it; the local stream did pass slow and dark through the wetland. The post office ran with that name until 1905.⁵

David Wilson died November 23, 1884, age 90. He is buried in the same graveyard where his wife's grandfather was the first burial 63 years earlier. The stone vault the neighbors built to protect his family's graves is on your left as you drive up River Styx Road.