In the present day the old cemetery presents a truly pathetic view. Infringed upon by the widening of the railway on the north side, it is fronted on the south and west by two unpaved streets, which at most times of the year are muddy in the extreme. At the east end of the once beautiful little cemetery are a number of miserable huts marking the habitations of squatters. One may enter the cemetery without effort, as the fence kept up by the settlers of old has long rotted and followed into oblivion its makers. Throughout the whole graveyard the number of tombstones may be counted on the fingers, and these weary with the long wait of years, lean as if they, too, like their many companions, sink into the soil and are lost forever.

Another newspaper article describes the graveyard in the following bleak terms:

. . .in many cases the graves are so over run with weeds and vines that it is almost an impossibility to find the markers . . . There is no sanctity or sacredness whatsoever in the spot . . . Tramps and hoboes make the sacred plot one of rendesvous, where they gather . . . No fence encloses the grounds whatever . . .

This article, preserved at the Public Library of Columbus and Franklin County, is undated, but apparently was published in 1906; it mentions the burial of Mrs. Elizabeth Rhoades "about 15 years ago." It speaks of a movement started on the West Side and "agitated" by West Side citizens to repair and clean up the old graveyard, enclose it, and make it a beauty spot. City officials promised to trim the trees, clean out the lawns, and reset old markers and gravestones. City records show that the lot was surveyed in 1906 and the surveyor attempted to establish the City's title to the property.

In the 78 years since that time, the graveyard has been protected and honored by man but has suffered from the normal ravages of time. A visitor in the spring of 1984 found only five legible or partly legible tombstones: those of James Armitage, William Brown, Isabella Oharra, and Margaret Kelley, and a broken one identified from the 1898 reading as that of Hon. John A. M'Dowell. Another stone, a block marked "Charles Kemmerle 1867-1878," was obviously an intruder. Several other stones remained, broken off below their inscriptions. A marker at the River Street (originally Water Street) entrance,