The Restoration Movement / Doty Settlement Cemetery

Side A: In the early years of the nineteenth century, a religious unrest known as the Second Great Awakening spread across much of the American frontier. Among the most influential of the evolving religious organizations were the Campbellites, or Disciples of Christ, founded in the 1820s by Thomas and Alexander Campbell. The Campbellite movement sought to “restore” New Testament Christianity by calling for a return to the primitive church revealed in the gospels. Campbellites denied creeds and oath-taking and rejected sectarianism. They believed in baptism by immersion and communion on Sundays. Followers also dealt with problems and transgressions of members within the church and did not use civil courts. They held a millennial view that professed human happiness and the belief that Christ would reign on earth for a thousand years. Believers spread this word to the pioneers of the Doty Settlement and elsewhere. By 1850, there were ninety Campbellite Churches in Ohio. Side B: In 1844, one acre of land in the Doty Settlement was given by Job Smith to the First Congregation of Christian Disciples (Campbellites) of Oxford Township for church and burial purposes. A 24 by 36 foot frame meeting house was constructed, but the inside was never completed. Over a period spanning nearly 100 years, numerous burials occurred in the cemetery. Some graves were marked, and others were not. The Smith, Morris, and Doty families were the first in the settlement to embrace the Campbellite faith, and some family members were buried here. The Moore family came into the church after 1850, as did some Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian families. The Doty Settlement church was dissolved by 1905, and the cemetery was abandoned by the mid-20th century.