Grave of Ooty founder located, claims historian

Ten years of relentless search by a historian to locate the grave of John Sullivan, founder of the famous tourist town of Udhagamandalam or Ooty, has finally borne fruit with the academic stumbling on the tombstone at a church in London.

"I have been searching for the grave for over a decade through genealogical groups in UK," Dharmalingam Venugopal, director of Nilgiris Documentation Centre at Sullivan Memorial at Kothagiri near here, said.

"I was able to zero in on the grave now thanks to digitalisation and amalgamation of most information on British India," he claimed.

Venugopal said he would visit the grave at St Laurence Church at Upton near London on July 14, during his tour to the UK under a sponsorship from the British Council.

The director said Sullivan should be given full credit for Nilgiris being the most advanced hill station in India today. "Adventurous, enterprising and progressive, these attributes best suit Sullivan, founder of the first full-fledged hill station in the country," he said.

Born in 1788, Sullivan joined East India Company in 1804 as a writer (clerk). In 1807, he became assistant to the chief secretary in the Secret, Political and Foreign department. Two years later, he became acting assistant to the resident at Mysore.

He was collector of Chinglepet for a year before becoming collector of Coimbatore in 1815.

Sullivan became the principal collector and magistrate of Coimbatore and remained so till 1830. In 1835, he became a senior member of the Board of Revenue and in 1839 a member of council of the governors, Venugopal said.

He said Sullivan had ambitious plans to transform Nilgiris district, under which Ooty falls, into an industrial town like Yorkshire in UK. The Britisher felt the inexhaustible supply of water power by streams would lead to establishment of mills and factories of every kind.

His dream came true later when Coimbatore emerged as an industrial town, thanks to water and hydel power from the Nilgiris, Venugopal said.

Sullivan's idea to form a huge lake in Ooty was also intended to irrigate far off fields in Salem and Erode under his jurisdiction and it was realised in the 1950s when the Bhavani Sagar dam was built.

A year after landing in the Nilgiris, Sullivan married 17-year-old Henrietta in 1820, who died there at the age of 35, after giving birth to nine children, Venugopal said.

Sullivan returned to England in 1841, after the death of his wife and two chidren in Ootacamund (Ooty), but with seven more children to care for.

One of them Henry Edward Sullivan, following the family tradition, later became the collector of Coimbatore.

John Sullivan died in England on January 16, 1855, leaving behind a flourishing new hill district, Ooty, the "Queen of the Hills".