Cemetery Description

Valley Street Cemetery, historically known as Minerva Cemetery, is located at the north corner of the intersection of Valley Street and South Grant Boulevard in Brown Township, Carroll County, Ohio (Minerva Junction, Ohio 44657; 40.72480° N, -81.10660° W). The cemetery occupies land within the Northwest Quarter of Fractional Section 1, Township 14, Range 6, and was expanded during the nineteenth century through a series of conveyances by the Mackey family.

One of the most significant of these is the 1889 warranty deed from Caroline W. Mackey and Thomas Mackey to Clarence Mackey, which conveyed approximately three-quarters of an acre adjoining "Mackey's New Addition to the Minerva Cemetery." The deed describes the addition as bounded by the Connotton Valley (later Cleveland and Canton) Railroad, the county road leading from Minerva to Pekin, and the northern boundary of the cemetery, providing one of the earliest surviving legal descriptions of the cemetery's expanded grounds. This conveyance serves as an important primary source documenting the cemetery's physical growth and the Mackey family's role in its development during the late nineteenth century.

Today, the cemetery is officially registered with the Ohio Division of Real Estate and Professional Licensing (ODRE) as Valley Street Cemetery under Registration No. CGR.0000980412. It is listed as Cemetery No. 13316 (Old Minerva Cemetery / Valley Street Cemetery) in Ohio Cemeteries, 1803–2003, compiled by the Ohio Genealogical Society, and is identified by the U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) as Minerva Cemetery (Feature ID 1079991). These modern identifications establish the continuity of the burial ground from its nineteenth-century legal descriptions to its present-day recognition as one of Minerva's oldest historic cemeteries.