07/24/2026
After the Revolutionary War, the federal government and nine state governments awarded bounty lands to citizens and soldiers for military service rendered. Thousands of veterans moved west into what is now Indiana and the surrounding states. The Indiana Society of the Sons of the Revolution has been locating, cataloging, and marking the final resting places of these Patriots for a number of years.
According to that registry, there are three known such graves in Lake County, Indiana. An Obadiah Taylor, of Massachusetts, died in 1839 and was buried in the old West Point Cemetery, in Cedar Lake. Another Cedar Lake cemetery, Meyer Manor Mound, holds the remains of William Van Gorder, originally from New Jersey.
The third veteran gravesite is that of Stephen Wilcox at Pleasant View Cemetery in St. John Township near New Elliott.
Stephen was born in April of 1767 in Dutchess County, NY, one of many children of Elisha and Abigail Ranney Wilcox, both of whom were born in Connecticut. By 1772, the family had relocated to northeastern Pennsylvania in the Poconos. At the time it was a hotbed of unrest and low-grade warfare due to conflicting and overlapping land disputes between Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and the Iroquois Confederation, for control of the fertile Wyoming Valley along the Susquehanna River.
In an armed conflict in June of 1778, Elisha Wilcox was captured and detained as a prisoner by the Native Americans. He was forced to join them and the British Rangers in an attack one month later against the Wyoming settlers in the Battle of Wyoming which became a massacre. He apparently survived the remainder of the war as a Loyalist and died in July of 1795 at Point Pelee, in Ontario, Canada.
Stephen married Rachel Campbell in 1789 and they had at least 3 sons and 6 known daughters.
According to Stephen's petition for a military pension he, at the age of 11 or 12, had assisted in the er****on of a garrison near Wilkes-Barre and took guard duty in the Continental Army under Col. Zebulon Butler, serving seven months.
His pension requests were denied for a number of years due to the rigid enforcement of the Revolutionary War Pension Act of 1818, which required applicants to prove they were "absolutely indigent" resulting in a high volume of denials. Stephen's petition was tabled until pension laws became more lenient and inclusive by 1828, when his was finally approved and passed.
Stephen and Rachel remained in Pennsylvania until sometime in the 1840's when they were in their 70's and emigrated west to Lake County, IN, with daughters, Jane Wilcox Butler and Amy Wilcox, and son James. They settled in present day Merrillville.
Stephen died at the age of 82 on December 19, 1849. Rachel predeceased him in 1847.
Their descendants married into other early settler families in the area, including the Demmons and the Pierces.
Photo credit: Find A Grave
