WARREN — About a dozen people who came out for Saturday morning’s Trumbull County Historical Society Walking Tour of Oakwood Cemetery on Niles Road were urged to see the landmark cemetery as historic and inspiring.

“Our goal is to bring back the parklike structure of the cemetery, where people are coming for tours and senior pictures and a walk with their sweetheart or their best friend and sit and have a cup of coffee on the bench,” Holly Taylor-Meyer, president of the board of the Oakwood Cemetery Association, said.

She said other goals of the cemetery are for people to “reflect on how nature is so important to our lives and that the cemetery is not just for the saddest days of your life, but to incorporate into your life into a more gentle flow. Let’s go for a walk. The cemetery has great things to look at,” she said.

Taylor-Meyer, the tour guide for the event, showed visitors sections of the cemetery containing the monuments and headstones of some of the earliest settlers in Northeast Ohio, such as members of the Kinsman and Perkins families.

Gen. Simon Perkins is among the most important early residents of Warren, being the largest landowner in Warren when he came to the area from Connecticut around 1800, she said.

The Perkins Mansion, built in 1871 is Warren’s iconic City Hall on Mahoning Avenue. It was named for Henry Bishop Perkins, son of Simon Perkins, who took over his father’s business and “made a lot of money during his time,” Taylor-Meyer said.

“To give you an idea of how wealthy he was, he was the very first citizen to be asked for a private loan to the Union during the Civil War,” Taylor-Meyer said. He made most of his money in banking and railroads.

He inherited “incredible amounts of land after his father passed away” and was a primary stockholder of the Cleveland and Mahoning Railroad. He was later elected a director of the Western Reserve Bank, one of the first banks in Northeast Ohio.

Henry Bishop Perkins suffered from what they called “melancholia,” presumably major depression disorder, and died in 1902 by suicide in his law office. That building, which houses Warren’s Law Department, is still located next to City Hall. One of the most impressive monuments in the Oakwood Cemetery is the Perkins mausoleum, which was erected in 1907 by Eliza, wife of Henry Bishop Perkins, in her husband’s memory.

Another Warren landmark is the Kinsman House, next door to Warren City Hall, which Simon Perkins built as a wedding gift to his daughter, Olive.

Simon Perkins, Henry Bishop Perkins and Olive Kinsman are all buried in Oakwood Cemetery, as well as Olive’s husband, Frederick Kinsman, son of John Kinsman, who settled Kinsman Township. The Kinsman House is named for Frederick Kinsman.

As Taylor-Meyer began the tour, she showed those attending various grave markers that are noticeably whiter than others. That’s because she and other volunteers have cleaned some of them.

She stressed that the cleanings are all “very gentle. No power washing.” She said it is a “soft-tooth-brush kind of gentle. You can actually see the letters on the stones now, whereas you were not able to before.”

The first stop was Perkins Hill, where Perkins and Kinsman relatives are buried. Taylor-Meyer talked about how such families came to Warren from Connecticut in the late 1700s because of the large land claim given to the state of Connecticut.

It would be known as the Connecticut Western Reserve and would cover 120 miles in Northeast Ohio, starting at the Ohio-Pennsylvania line. Among the people who bought land from the Connecticut Land Company were people whose last names were Hubbard, Brace (Braceville) and Howland, she noted.

John Kinsman was among those who bought land in the Western Reserve. “His children lived throughout the area,” Taylor-Meyer said.

The earliest grave in Oakwood Cemetery is that of Elizabeth Iddings, who died in 1848. Some people, including Simon Perkins, were initially buried in Pioneer Cemetery in Warren. But after Oakwood Cemetery opened, “many families had their relatives reinterred (in Oakwood Cemetery) to be together in the same plot,” she said.

Among others buried in the cemetery are William Henry Dana, who founded the Dana School of Music in 1869 in downtown Warren. The school later joined with Youngstown College, now known as Youngstown State University, where the school continues today.

There is also a Packard plot in the cemetery, where members of the Packard family responsible for Packard automobiles, lighting and automotive wiring are buried, including W. D. Packard and J.W. Packard.