Local history: Is that a meteorite at Glendale Cemetery?

Have you heard that there is a meteorite on display at Glendale Cemetery?

For more than 100 years, Akron residents have passed down the story about the red-and-gray boulder that serves as a grave marker in a family plot. The striped rock is a popular stop on cemetery tours.

Forester R. Archibald, a professional photographer who had a studio on Balch Street, helped popularize the tale in 1902 when he took a picture of the stone and submitted it with explanatory information to The Strand Magazine, a British publication.

“Ten years ago a meteor fell on the farm of Mr. T.B. Lane, Talmadge, Ohio,” Archibald wrote. “It penetrated 16ft. into the earth. It was afterwards dug up, and upon the death of Mr. Lane some years later was placed upon the family monument in Glendal Cemetery, Akron, Ohio, where it is one of the greatest attractions. It resembles a great lamp of iron ore.”

There is so much wrong with the account — beginning with the spellings of Tallmadge and Glendale. Furthermore, there was no T.B. Lane in Tallmadge. In fact, the actual owner of the cemetery plot was very much alive at the time.

Archibald, a Cleveland native, had lived in town for only a year, so it’s possible that he was not acquainted with Samuel Alanson Lane, 86, perhaps the best-known man in Akron.

Lane had served as Summit County sheriff and Akron mayor. He had been the editor of the Summit County Beacon, the weekly forerunner of the Akron Beacon Journal, and had founded the Daily Beacon. He also had authored “Fifty Years and Over of Akron and Summit County,” the definitive local history of the 19th century.

There was no record of a meteor falling in Tallmadge in the 1890s. Meteorites are objects from outer space that survive a fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere. Such a spectacle would have been big news in Summit County.

A sheepish Archibald published a correction March 3, 1902, in the Beacon Journal.

“In the description appended I alluded to the stone as a meteorite and that it fell near this city,” Archibald wrote. “For this information I was indebted to a party whose truthfulness cannot be questioned. It appears, however, that he was misinformed and that the rock is a product of the Lake Superior region. I am glad to make the correction and deeply regret the inconvenience the error has caused Mr. Lane of West Market street, the owner of the lot upon which the stone rests.”

Lane had installed the rock in 1900 on a granite slab at the cemetery. A block-and-tackle system was needed to hoist the object, which reportedly weighed several tons and measured about 4 feet by 3 feet. Archibald’s retraction indicated that Lane knew the marker wasn’t a meteorite, although it didn’t explain where the octogenarian procured the unusual rock.

According to one account, the boulder had been hauled to Akron from Painesville, but that’s not where it originated. Either someone lugged it from far away or glaciers deposited it during the Ice Age.

Three months after printing the correction, Archibald unexpectedly died June 14 at age 28 after a three-week bout with typhoid fever. He was buried at Mount Peace Cemetery.

Lane died exactly three years later — June 14, 1905 — in his home at 212 W. Market St. about where the Courtesy Inn stands today. Two weeks shy of his 90th birthday, Lane was buried beneath the strange headstone at Glendale next to his first wife, children and siblings.

An urban legend hurtled through Akron with the speed of a meteor. A rock from the sky! Children visited the cemetery and imagined the fiery plunge to Earth.

“Is it really a meteorite from outer space?” retired B.F. Goodrich executive Chester Conner (1885-1977) asked the Beacon Journal in 1965. “In my boyhood, we believed it was and we kids hunted it out and stared at it in awe. At the cemetery office they say it is a meteorite and that scientific men have been there to confirm the fact. Others say that, if it were, it would be in a museum somewhere.”

Reporter Kenneth Nichols (1911-1987), who had once hailed the rock as “the only meteor ever known to have fallen on Akron town,” replied that Glendale Superintendent Edgar C. Warren and his predecessor, William H. Collins, had backed up the tale.

“The visitor from way out is a meteorite,” Nichols wrote. “It has been with us 65 years, fulfilling an unusual role. It’s a headstone.”

Decades later, someone scrawled “WRONG!” in black ink on newspaper clippings in the Beacon Journal archives. That was reporter Craig Wilson (1927-2007), former “Action Line” editor, who enjoyed portraying Samuel Lane, complete with a long white beard, in public presentations around Summit County.

The rock is not from outer space, Wilson insisted.

“I debunked that story by escorting a geology professor from the University of Akron to Glendale,” Wilson wrote in 1991. “She identified the meteor as ‘carboniferous conglomerate,’ a large sample of stratified iron ore.”

Joseph T. Hannibal, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, weighed in on the matter — and decisively so — with the publication of his “Guide to the Building Stones and Cultural Geology of Akron.” He prepared the 2006 guidebook for a sectional meeting in Akron of the Geological Society of America.

After careful analysis, he identified the giant rock over Lane’s grave as a piece of “banded iron formation” composed of “alternating layers of reddish jasper-rich material and gray layers that are rich in hematite and magnetite.”

“While perhaps not as exotic as a meteorite, this rock has indeed traveled a long way to get to Glendale Cemetery, as the closest deposits of banded iron are located in the iron ranges of Minnesota and Michigan,” Hannibal wrote.

So it’s from the Midwest, not outer space. The legend persists, though.

Have you heard that there is a meteorite on display at Glendale Cemetery?

It’s not true.

Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@thebeaconjournal.com

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Does a meteorite mark the grave of Samuel Lane at Glendale Cemetery?