The Mystery of an Empty House, an Unearthed Body, and the Fields of a Framer Named Frost
Unlocking the Book of the Lockes (Part I)
On August 26, 2011, a Friday morning, a farmer named Doran Frost was taking a break from disking his field along the Watkins Road, when the teen he’d hired to help approached, holding out his hands and saying, “What do you want me to do with this?” He was holding a human skull.
Doran’s field was near the northern edge of Chemung County in upstate New York. He’d been plowing up ground to plant trees, and he’d hired the young man to follow behind him, tossing to the side the rocks the blades turned up in the Catharine Valley, the glacial rift in which Catharine Creek ran. The boy marked the place where he found the skull with a stick, not far from the highway’s shoulder.
By afternoon, investigators from the Chemung County Sheriff’s arrived with a forensics team and a mobile command center. They cordoned off the section of field as a potential crime scene and spent the day running the dirt through a three-tiered sifter, separating out bone fragments that they laid carefully on a blanket. Whether the bones were male or female, no one could tell. One investigator later told a reporter that “Some of them are decomposed to the point of having an expert identify them.” They worked well into the evening.
The following day, the story was front page news in the Elmira Star-Gazette. Christopher Moss, the sheriff at the time, was quoted as saying that he thought “the skeleton could be more than 100 years old.” He would soon be proved right. Eventually, the bones were taken north to Batavia, where Dr. Jennifer J. Prutsman-Pfeiffer, the forensic anthropologist assigned the case, figured the bones to have been in the ground since the late-1700’s to the early 1800’s. It would turn out that she wasn’t far off.
Doran’s niece Melissa Frost, a school librarian in Rochester, came to the site. She was a history afficionado, like her father, Eugene, and she had studied a document from the early 1930’s compiled by Addie Johnston Staver, who had traveled over the countryside documenting family graveyards. Staver had a particular interest in Revolutionary War soldiers—and in fact, the township that the field lay in is that of Veteran, named for the original settler, Green Bentley, who had fought in the Revolution and the French and Indian War, and he had served on the Sullivan Campaign that had crossed this very valley in 1779. He was thought to have arrived in what was then Montgomery County around 1790, when his name appears in the first United States census. By tradition, though, he is said to have arrived in the Catharine Valley about 1798.
Staver documented a graveyard called the Coryell Cemetery, which she describes as “In Veterans township, on the Watkins Road, way down in a field on the border of Schuyler County. It must have been one of the very first in Chemung County. It was plowed over fifty years ago and completely destroyed. About sixteen persons were buried there.” The only burial there she could identify, though, was that of Michael Coryell, who died in 1819 at the age of nineteen.
Melissa Frost deduced that the bones her uncle’s plow had unearthed must have been those from the Coryell Cemetery. She reported her research to the township, and in the end, they placed a roadsign beside the Watkins Road documenting it as such.
As for the bones, they disappeared for a full year into the lab in Batavia, despite repeated attempts by the sheriff’s department to contact the forensics expert. Finally, Prutsman-Pfeiffer declared the findings inconclusive. By the end of August, 2012, the case was closed.
J. Kelsey Jones, who worked in Watkins Glen and commuted this road from Elmira, passed the field daily. He noticed the taped off field and decided to investigate. Jones, too, is a local historian—today he is the official Chemung County Historian. He read the article in the Star-Gazette and, knowing something of the history of the township, realized that the bones were far older than a century. But he didn’t believe what had been dug up was the Coryell Cemetery.
He deduced, instead, that the bones were those of James Locke, another early settler to Veteran. Locke had lived beside the Watkins Road until 1849 when the railroad, the Northern Central, was being built in the valley. Locke reportedly died on the first of August of that year.
Jones knew that Addie Johnston Staver had also documented—on the same page as the Coryell Cemetery, no less—the Locke Cemetery, which she described thus: “Veterans Township, way up on a hillside under an old apple tree, is one lone grave marked with a field stone.” But given that the Locke Cemetery was described as farther up a hillside, those graves are apparently different from the one found in 2011 which was far closer to the road itself. But then there’s this: She describes James Locke, who died at the age of seventy-one. “He was a soldier in the War of 1812…a graduate of Harvard University,” she wrote. “When the branch of the Pennsylvania R.R. was built through this valley, cholera broke out among the workers. Mr. Locke, a farmer, contracted the disease and died. This grave is just off the Watkins Road, almost to the line of Schuyler and Chemung Counties.”
This information had been offered her by Charles Wintermute Sleeper, Locke’s grandson. Born in 1845, Sleeper would have been eighty-five when Stavers interviewed him. She wrote that he had erected a marker for his grandfather in the Millport Cemetery, in the village south of the property known as “The Locke Place.” The body, however, was never moved there.
Given Stavers’ description of both the hillside Locke and downhill Coryell cemeteries, either would have been too far from the road—and the bones were found close to the highway’s shoulder, only some ten yards downslope. But given the description of James Locke’s grave, Jones was convinced that the unearthed body was his. In August of 2023, a full twelve years after the discovery, I went to see for myself.