Caleb Blood Smith - Search For Body

Search For Body

It has been said that Caleb B. Smith's body is buried in a Connersville, Indiana cemetery. In 1977, Connersville resident John Walker received permission from the Smith family, Norvella Thomas Copes, and Nancy S. Hurley, and the city of Connersville to excavate the body of Caleb Blood Smith. Walker had an interest in President Abraham Lincoln, and discovered in reading about Lincoln that one of his cabinet members was buried in the city in which he lived. An excavation was done in November, but Smith's body was not there. It was Smith's son-in-law William Watton Smith. C.B. Smith's wife, Elizabeth B. Watton, had paid $500 for the choice of plots, in Greenlawn Cemetery but had to remove the body to Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis for fear of southern dissenters, the Sons of Liberty, desecrating his body and of local teens knocking over the markers. There was also a possibility that his body was in one of the two above ground vaults behind the Warren Lodge, also known as Elmhurst, but both doors were standing open and had been for years, with nothing inside (also in Connersville, Indiana). A letter inquiring about the whereabouts of Smith's body found in the 1980s arose from a New York public library in the 1930s.