I spent some time a few years ago at Hilly Grove Cemetery on Manitoulin Island, walking the rows of headstones the marked its well maintained plots. I was searching for familiar names in the oldest section of the cemetery. I knew before I headed to the island that several of the original Tehkummah settlers could be found there: George Amer, Laban Amer, Charles Boyd, Oswald Hinds, Mary Ann Sloan, Samuel Sloan.

What I didn't know was the exact location of the cemetery but I figured that since Hilly Grove seemed like a tiny postage stamp of a place it would likely not be difficult to find. Just point the car and go. Fortunately, it's located on the east side of Highway 6 in the Township of Assiginack, roughly half way between Manitowaning and Tehkummah and is entered through a iron gate flanked on either side by a colourful field-stone wall.

Established in 1884 on a two-acre property donated by early settler John Rutledge, its size increased 15 years later when Rutledge gifted an additional 4.5 acres. A Presbyterian church was added to the cemetery grounds in 1903 and services were held there for the next 60 years. The church was later adapted into the cemetery's chapel in the 1970s.

Many early residents of Tehkummah who factored into the 1877 murder of William and Charles Bryan are buried here although locating them turned out to be trickier than I thought it would be, partly because some of the original headstones had been replaced by modern stones over the years. As a result, I had to walk the cemetery twice because I was looking for well-weathered markers on the first pass only to realize roughly three-quarters of the way through that modern grave stones were marking old graves.

Another complication cropped up because while many of the original headstones still stand, some have weathered to the point where they are now barely legible. This was true of the grave marker for Sam Sloan, which is embedded deep in the grass and partially overgrown, making it difficult to make out the inscription. The headstone for George Amer and Laban Amer, on the other hand, was replaced somewhere along the line and the modern replacement was easy to read.

I never did find the gravestone marking Charles Boyd's grave although several sources listed him as being buried there, so it was clear that somehow I had missed him. Not only did a later search reveal that his headstone was one of the barely legible ones, his name was inscribed as Chas. D. Boyd. It's possible I spotted the marker, but did not realize that Charles Boyd and Chas. D. Boyd were the same person.

Notably, the murders of William and Charles Bryan, which are central to my historical novel The Haweaters, came seven years before the establishment of Hilly Grove cemetery. As a result, their barely legible headstones can be found embedded in the lawn of St. Paul's Anglican Church in Manitowaning.