Nicholas Harris Cemetery restored after decades of neglect in Boone Township

Most of the stones at Nicholas Harris Cemetery disappeared in the late 1800s, and some were reportedly reused as weights on a farm harrow. The burial ground sits on a bluff near the White River in Boone Township, near Portersville, and for more than a century it came close to being erased from local memory. A preservation effort that began in early 2012 kept the site from disappearing entirely.

William O. Harris approached Delbert “Junie” Himsel for help after recognizing that the family cemetery needed more than good intentions to survive. Himsel brought decades of cemetery restoration experience to the project, and local restoration resources credit him with work on many cemeteries in Dubois and Orange counties. That mix of family concern and hands-on preservation work is what gave Nicholas Harris Cemetery a future.

The cemetery matters for more than one family line. It is the final resting place of a Civil War veteran, a detail that ties the site directly to Dubois County’s broader history of military service, settlement and migration. Local history also places Richard Harris, a Civil War veteran who came with his father from Carolina in 1817, in the Portersville story, showing how deeply the Harris name is woven into Boone Township.

That history sits in a landscape that has already lost other markers. Portersville land was bought by Jacob Lemmon on Sept. 19, 1814, and the settlement became the first county seat of Dubois County in 1818. Another local burial ground, Portersville Cemetery, was already in use before Portersville became the county seat and had many unmarked pioneer graves, a reminder that older cemeteries often preserve more of the county’s past than their surviving stones suggest.

The preservation work around Nicholas Harris Cemetery also fits into a broader county network of documentation. The Jasper-Dubois County Public Library, the Indiana State Library and the Indiana Genealogical Society all maintain materials that help researchers track family names, burial sites and local history. The National Archives also keeps federal military service records from the Revolutionary War through 1912, including records that can help document Civil War burials.

Nicholas Harris Cemetery survived because someone noticed what was at risk before the ground itself was forgotten. In Boone Township, that meant one family cemetery stayed tied to the record of Portersville, the Harris family and the county’s early settlement history instead of slipping out of it for good.