OLD PIONEER CEMETERY
Cemetery — Bardstown, Kentucky
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/old-pioneer-cemetery-bardstown-kentucky/

Cemetery in Bardstown; research record.

A cemetery in Bardstown, Kentucky, Old Pioneer Cemetery is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Cemetery in Bardstown; research record. HauntHunt files it with dark history. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — a documented spine with no haunting reports attached. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip. Names, dates and reports are filed together here, so the record stays honest about which is which.

The block behind Bardstown's old Nelson County Jail — now the Jailer's Inn — holds the town's first graveyard. In 1789 the trustees set aside lots 111 and 112 at Fourth and Graves for a public burying ground, though the plot may have been used earlier; the streets' names have since been renamed around it — the block is now bounded by South 4th, West John Fitch Avenue, and Mulberry Alley.
In 1819 the trustees confined all in-town burial to this 'jail lot,' citing water-supply contamination — a rare documented instance of burial regulation driven by sanitation rather than piety. Burials continued until the 1850s, when the town bought ground north of the center for a new cemetery.

THE STEAMBOAT MAN'S FIRST GRAVE
The yard's most famous burial did not stay buried here. John Fitch — the Connecticut-born inventor who ran a working steamboat on the Delaware years before Fulton — died in Bardstown in 1798 and was interred in this ground; in 1927 his remains were moved beneath the memorial on Court Square. What remains are the graves that stayed: chest tombs raised above ground, a Revolutionary War soldier, and named pioneers whose inscriptions Bardstown's own records preserve.
Kentucky Tourism lists the cemetery among Bardstown's historic-and-spooky stops, and the file takes it at that level — a documented pioneer graveyard in disuse, enclosed by a functioning town. No haunting claim is asserted; the eeriness is supplied by the address, not by any filed encounter.

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· Kentucky Tourism describes a disused historic cemetery behind Jailer’s Inn. A cemetery in Bardstown, Kentucky with this much on record gives the file real ground to stand on. It enters the file through media reporting — documented coverage, not folklore. Sources including '6 Historic and Spooky Places to Visit in Bardstown' carry the record. It anchors the timeline the rest of the file hangs from.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· 6 Historic and Spooky Places to Visit in Bardstown — Kentucky Department of Tourism
  https://www.kentuckytourism.com/trip-planning/travel-inspiration/articles/2023/07/25/6-historic-(and-spooky)-places-to-visit-in-bardstown-kentucky

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