I went to the library today and found some great information! For one, the area that Clements Cememtery is in used to be called the "Big Grove" by the early Urbana settlers, now it is known as Somer Township. There is one Indian Burial Ground nearby by the name of Adkin's or Atkin's Point. It is a Kickapoo tribe burial ground. I went to the area and there are houses there now. There is also an old settler graveyard nearby from the early 1800's called Rhinehart cemetery, I went there, it is now a cornfield. There is a small creek that runs right through downtown Urbana called the Boneyard Creek. I now know the reason it was called that is because Kickapoo Indians would camp along its banks and the early settlers found it scattered with the bones of animals they had hunted. The bar I used to manage stands where there used to be an old hickory tree and an old cherry tree that marked the childhood home of an Indian Chief named Chief Shemauger aka "Old Soldier". Chief Shemauger was friendly to the early settlers and would often tell stories near the old trees.
Here is an old article I found from the local paper:
By Kirby Pringle
The Blue Man was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave in Clements Cemetery and no one knows exactly where his bones rest. The blue man supposedly haunts the cemetery until his name is cleared for a murder he did not commit. The blue man was an itinerant farmhand by the name of Ivers Peerson who went from farm to farm around Champaign county looking for work. In July 1872, he was helping a rural Urbana farmer cut hay and was staying with the couple, the Nielsens, in their 2-story farmhouse.
Their childless marriage was a troubled one and Peerson could often hear them arguing at night from his room upstairs. But they rarely bickered in his presence.
One morning Nielsen said he had to take the buggy into town to pick up a relative at the train station and left Peerson to cut hay on his own. The farmhand, a muscular, lanky man, didn't mind. He could get just as much work done alone, anyway, as he took long swipes of the clover and prairie grasses with the sharp scythe. He had never worked for a man like Nielsen, who tolled at a fevered pitch, but always had little to show for his effort.
The hay field wasn't far from the farmhouse and the farmer's wife always had a big lunch ready for the noon meal.
At noon, Peerson-scythe in hand-went to the farmhouse. When he opened the kitchen door he found the floor red with blood and Mrs. Nielsen, her lower half covered with a blue blanket, sprawled beside a pie safe, a trail of bloody handprints on the doors.
When Peerson saw the woman, he instinctively let go of the scythe and it fell onto the bloody kitchen floor. He hurried to her side and saw deep cuts all over her head, neck and upper body. It was clear that she had been hacked to death by some sort of sharp instrument. He looked down at the blanket, soaked in blood, and realized it was the blanket from his upstairs
.
As Peerson knelt at her side, wondering what to do next, Nielsen and the relative-the wife's sister-stepped into the kitchen. The young woman screamed in horror and Nielsen yelled at the farmhand to get away from his wife.
Nielsen quickly checked his wife and saw she was dead. He then pulled a handgun from the kitchen cabinet and ordered Peerson, whose hands were bloody from touching the dead woman, back outside. Peerson tried to explain that he had only come upon the wife a few minutes before.
"That's the way I found her when I came in for lunch. I didn't do it. You have to believe me." Peerson pleaded.
Those words were repeated often-fromt he time of his arrest until he found himself at the end of a rope. But all the evidence pointed only to Peerson. Because of the blue blanket, the crime became known as the Blue Blanket Murder.
Peerson was found guilty and hanged in a public execution outside Champaign County Courthouse, maintaining his innocence until the very end. The End
Another small article I found stated The Blue Man was an unidentified black man found hanging on the edge of Clements Cemetery from a suicide or a lynching in 1841.
