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Holy Apostles Church Cemetery resides in the town of Hobart in Oneida, Brown, Wisconsin. Also known as Holy Apostles Episcopal Church Cemetery, the church and cemetery are located on the Oneida Reservation. The earliest, recorded burials date from 1819. The cemetery is still active and interments are indigenous peoples and their families.
The Oneida are apart of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, along with the Seneca, Mohawk, Tuscarora, Onondaga and Cayuga peoples. Their lands lie mostly in New York State; however, many of them were pushed west into the Ohio Valley area, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. Some headed north into what is today, Canada, and the Six Nations Reserve.
"The Oneida people in New York had a relationship with Anglican and Episcopal missionaries since the very early 1700s. Longtime parishioner the late Gordy McLester’s most recent book of history is called A Chain Linking Two Traditions: The Wisconsin Oneidas and the Episcopal Church.
In 1816, the Episcopal Bishop of New York, John Henry Hobart, appointed Eleazer Williams to be a missionary to the Oneida people.
After they moved to Wisconsin in1822, the Episcopalian Oneidas first gathered beneath the trees to worship.
Then in 1825, a little log church was built on top of a hill that is now the cemetery. The Oneidas wanted their new church to bear the name of their “Father”, Bishop Hobart, and they received permission to call it the Hobart Church (later, Holy Apostles Church)."
"The Church of the Holy Apostles is the oldest Indian mission of the Episcopal Church, tracing its roots to the earliest Anglican missionaries from the Church of England and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in the area that later became central New York, around Oneida Lake....
The Episcopal Mission was part of Oneida Reservation land held in trust by the United States and continued as such under the various land permutations until title was transferred by the United States to the Trustees of the Diocese of Fond du Lac by an Act of Congress through a patent deed in 1909.
In 1908, Indian Claim 141 is purchased from the Powles family to allow for expansion of the cemetery."
Notable People
- Chief Schenando, last of the New York chiefs who headed up the Oneidas when they came west. A descendant of the famous Chief Schenando who was a friend of George Washington, he was a noted orator. He died in 1897 and is buried in the Holy Apostles cemetery.
- Chief Daniel Bread was a famous Council Chief and prominent in the affairs of the Oneida, both in New York and Wisconsin. He died in 1873 and is buried in the Holy Apostles cemetery.
- Nancy Cornelius, the first trained Indian nurse in the United States.