The Only Known Whiskey Rebellion Soldier in Clinton County, Ohio
The stones of Joshua White and his wife, Eleanor, Section 5, Lot 3, Sabina Cemetery, Sabina, Ohio. Photographed September 29, 2026.
When I first saw the circled 4 on the Sabina Cemetery plat, I didn’t know what it meant.
The county’s WPA-era grave survey drew every cemetery lot by lot and circled a number beside each veteran’s name to mark his war. Nineteen meant the Civil War. One meant the Revolution. (Here’s how to read one of these plats.) Joshua White’s row, in Section 5, Lot 3, Grave 8, carries a 4, and the plat’s own legend turns it into “Whiskey Rebellion of Penn.”
Of the more than 2,000 veterans’ graves on those WPA-era records, his is the only one marked with that war.
and a soldier from 1794.
In 1794, farmers in western Pennsylvania rose against a federal tax on whiskey. President George Washington called out militia from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia and marched them west to put the uprising down. His 1938 grave registration card records his service in the same words the plat abbreviates: “Whisky Rebellion of Pennsylvania,” a private in “New Jersey Troops.”
The card names its own source, the county history of 1882, and that book fills in the rest. Joshua White, it says, “was one of the soldiers from New Jersey who went into Pennsylvania to suppress the insurrection.” After his discharge he stayed in Pennsylvania and married “Betsey Canno, of near Pittsburgh.” He moved on to Adams County, Ohio, and before 1814 settled in what was then Richland Township, now Wayne Township, Clinton County, Ohio. In 1829 he moved into Richland Township as it stands today.
His stone stands in Sabina Cemetery. It reads: died Oct. 2, 1849, “in the 88 yr of his age.” Weather has softened the year’s third digit, but the card reads it as 1849, and that fits both his age and the 1882 account.
The White lot in Section 5 of Sabina Cemetery. The cemetery company was organized in 1872; Joshua White died in 1849.
The cemetery around him was not organized until 1872. Its first burial came on June 27 of that year, and by 1884 The Sabina News counted 150 “removals from other points” among its graves. The 1882 history adds that most of the bodies in the old Sabina Graveyard, on the south side of town, “have been taken up and re-interred in the new cemetery.” Neither names who was moved, and no record I have says whether Joshua White was among them.
Beside him stands a smaller stone, broken below the name: “Eleanor, wife of Joshua White.” The 1882 history names his wife as Betsey. Eleanor and Betsey may be one woman or two. No record in hand settles it yet.
“Eleanor, wife of Joshua White.” The stone is broken below the name, and its date line is worn past a certain reading.
Until this September, Joshua White had no Find a Grave memorial. He now has one, with his registration card and a photograph of his stone. He is one of many veterans the county’s WPA-era grave maps are bringing back into the record, as those maps are matched, grave by grave, to public memorials.
The 1882 history says some of his descendants still lived in Richland Township. If Joshua White, Betsey or Eleanor turns up in your family’s papers, I would like to hear from you.
Sources: Sabina Cemetery, Clinton County WPA veterans’ grave plat, pages 56 and 59 (scan: Clinton County Engineer’s GIS website). Ohio Soldiers Grave Registration Card, Joshua White (Ohio History Connection, State Archives Series 183; Fold3 frame 182789_0002955). The History of Clinton County, Ohio (W. H. Beers & Co., 1882), pp. 760 and 765. The Sabina News, September 11, 1884, p. 3 (via NewspaperArchive). Gravestones of Joshua and Eleanor White, Sabina Cemetery, photographed September 29, 2026.
