Find A Grave

Black History Month – How erasing death erases history.

I thought for black history month I might present some of the black segregated cemeteries and why they are hard to find.

This is 1440 Forest Ave. in Staten Island New York. This is where an estimated 1000 people of color have been buried. Only 50 of the actual graves have been recorded but none of the graves have been moved.

Lot 384 is where the church and cemetery once existed. The church gone but not the cemetery

This slave and free folks cemetery was owned by the Second Asbury African Methodist Episcopal Church. The cemetery was made up of homemade wood crosses and stones that would mark a grave. The church was burned down by vandals in the late 1800s and the remains wood from the church was taken piece by piece. Eventually the graves were vandalized and one would be hard pressed to recognize it as a cemetery by 1920. The last person buried within the cemetery was in 1916. Perhaps you know of a cemetery with people buried in the 1800s that is still marked s a cemetery?

Along come some wealthy white land developers which tell the city that the land can’t be tax exempt because it’s not a cemetery, to them it didn’t look like one. The white city leaders agree and the land has a new tax debt of $11,000.00 that the board of the church did not receive until after the tax sale of the land happened.

The owners gave a donation to the Negro College Fund saying they had no idea it was a cemetery. Of course this happened after buildings were placed there. Ownership would change over the years but never any mention of remains dug up for which there had to be some. A strip mall was built by the third set of owners but when approached they refused a monument to mark the history of the cemetery. A plaque was finally put up but has since been removed.

Unfortunately there are very few records of slave burials or free folks of color burial records due to disrespect of others, land sold and bought with graves on the land. People of color didn’t own land and wouldn’t for another sixty plus years. They had no bargaining power over their own ancestors graves or their own deaths for that matter. That history and that knowledge of who came before them had been destroyed forever.

On this day in 1973 the Vietnam war came to an end when the US pulled troops from Vietnam.

January 27, 1973.

FloralMemorials.etsy.com

A Quiet Hillside in Kansas

I went to Coronado’s Castle just outside Greensburg Kansas recently and this quiet beautiful cemetery was next to the castle entrance. First I should explain that the castle was built during the 1930s as part of a WPA project and Coronado had nothing to do with it other than to use his name. The cemetery is along a rolling hillside and even had a few cattle grazing at a distance.

Kansas Country Cemetery #3

Like all of the cemeteries I will be posting, Roll cemetery , once way outside the city limits, is well within the city limits of Haysville, KS. Now Haysville KS is butt up against Wichita KS. You don’t realize you have left one and entered the other. I have blogged before my curiosity comes from my business , content for this blog, and the YouTube channel Sidestep Adventures. Kansas doesn’t have as long of a history as the state of Georgia which is where Sidestep Adventures takes place, but the history can be found in its small country cemeteries. This is Roll Cemetery and the Roll family is buried within. Family cemeteries were very common in the 1800s to early 1900s and Roll Cemetery displays that history well.

Roll Family Cemetery in Haysville KS.

Like the others I have posted Roll Cemetery has a beautiful handcrafted entrance and is well cared for. The fence came years later to keep others out and to mark the area which is designated as cemetery.

The fence is there although the cemetery will never fill the land.

Roll cemetery is on about an acre of land but runs along the side the dirt road and it’s length is greater than it’s width.

This is my favorite view of Roll Cemetery. The hand crafted iron gateway is simple but stark
against the Kansas Prairie.

#2 Kansas cemeteries you may never see

In my last post I wrote about my inspiration for posting pictures and comments about Kansas cemeteries. Not the huge mid century cemeteries and their big Masoleums or the newer cemeteries with flat markers, big statues and biblical names for each section. My inspiration is a YouTube channel called Sidestep Adventures. On this YouTube channel they take you through Georgia and Alabama cemeteries that many don’t realize exist and are so old they aren’t even mapped.

I’m starting in my own county of Sedgwick in the state of Kansas. Prairie cemeteries mark the harsh realities of what life was like in the early to late 1800s. The cemeteries are small and some of them are no longer hidden due to urban sprawl. Marked in stone is the life the prairie provided for the first that settled Kansas.

These pictures are of Eldridge Cemetery near Colwich KS. This is a farming community outside of Wichita KS. Colwich was once miles outside of the city but today is only 7 miles away from Wichita. There is no one named Eldridge buried here. The first grave that I could find belonged to a child named F. Arthur , age 1 year- 9 mos. Little Arthur is laid to rest with his father who shares the same stone maker. Most of the graves are from the late 1800s to the very early 1900s with very few exceptions. The majority of the graves are of infants, children, and young adults, with their parents following in death. There is one small mausoleum building with no identification of its owner. The cemetery is well groomed and some flowers were placed at one grave. The legacy of this Kansas cemetery seems to be the hard life of early farming in Kansas.

The cemetery is spread over about an acre of land
The notice tells you what you need to know
The sidewalk that welcomes you into the cemetery
All of the stones are large and elaborate with children having the largest stones. The electric pole in the back of this picture is the only thing that gives a hint to a new century.

Kansas Cemeteries you may never see. #1

I follow a YouTube Chanel called Sidestep Adventures. The host takes you through the past of Alabama and let me tell you it has a lot of past to view. I’m a bit of a history buff and I find his episodes on old cemeteries fascinating. Of course Kansas doesn’t have as many historical cemeteries, slave cemeteries, plantation cemeteries as Georgia and Alabama but we do have a few hidden gems. The difference being that our Kansas cemeteries are not hidden beneath bushes, wisteria, and huge oak trees. Kansas cemeteries are of the plains. The plains of Kansas were very harsh to the settlers of the 1800s, lots of sun, wind, and dust, and not much more. I have no doubt that many of the small farm cemeteries are long gone, plowed over and forgotten. The ones that do remain are quaint and quietly taken care of. The host of SidestepAdventures would tell you the cemeteries that remain almost own themselves. In other words, if a cemetery has been photographed and reported to the county that land can’t be sold or built on, so they just work around them. I will have to check out Kansas law on cemeteries before my next post.

Here is my first attempt at showing small Kansas cemeteries on the prairie.

#1 RUBY Cemetery. Although this cemetery is close to Clearwater KS ( population 2500) and Wichita KS (population 400,000.) You can see by my pictures it is a prairie cemetery of years ago.

An annual trip and cemeteries discovered………

Every year we drive up to Minnesota to see our youngest daughter and her partner. It’s such a long drive from Kansas (12 hours) that unless we have planed ahead we simply just drive, and that’s a lot of highway.

When we do pull off the highway, and as long as it doesn’t take us too far off the path, I try to locate local cemeteries. The small city of Cameron, Missouri has a population of around 10,000. Give or take a few thousand. This small size city has the daunting task of taking care of 5 cemeteries. All five are large cemeteries and all five belong to the city of Cameron. The cemeteries are: McDaniel 600+, Packard 2000+, Graceland Memorial 1000+, Graceland 2000+, Evergreen 1500+, the numbers represent approximately how many are buried at each cemetery. Cameron had a historical board as well as a cemetery board and with that many cemeteries to maintain its easy to understand why they have the boards. I’m in awe of how such a small city manages to maintain so much cemetery acreage.

These pictures are of Graceland and Evergreen cemeteries in Cameron, Missouri. Both cemeteries are directly off of I-35 and are directly across the street from one another.

Another small Kansas Cemetery

Like every state in the union Kansas has many small Cemeteries. Mount Zion is one such cemetery. This quiet little piece of green earth is along highway 160 and almost appears as a highway rest stop. Some of the earliest buried there are from the 1800’s with the latest burial in 2020. Mount Zion was once referred to as the Kellogg Cemetery. I can only assume that the cemetery sits on land that was once owned by the Kellogg family. There are four Kellogg family members laid to rest there in the late 1800s and early 1900s. When you visit this cemetery of roughly 200 souls on Find A Grave you will notice two things; one the family names are repetitive and very few died of old age. The Hubbard family have 7 children all under the age of 17 buried there, all with different dates and years of death. The Hubbard parents and extended family are not laid to rest there, which makes one wonder if they had too much of the Kansas prairie and left for a better life and less painful memories.

Another country cemetery

When driving through Kansas backroads it is not unusual to come across little country cemeteries. These cemeteries will pop up surrounded by fields of maize, wheat, sunflowers, or corn. FindAGrave.com has 9 cemeteries in Kansas names Mt. Zion. The picture below is a small cemetery outside Winfield, Kansas named Mt. Zion. This cemetery, like many others dotted around Kansas, sits by a dead end road surrounded by a field of green growing maize. Less than 200 people are buried there but the cemetery is set beneath shade trees and is well groomed and cared for. These little country cemeteries are so very peaceful and prideful.

My latest Newsletter

Sedgwick County Kansas – memorials / cemeteries

Do you know which cemeteries or memorials these pictures belong to? ANSWERS BELOW

History / not in books or online….

When I was in school many many years ago history was a class that always seemed to require the heaviest books. History class was OK  but it wasn’t my favorite. Maybe the reason school aged children aren’t interested in history is because they have no real history of their own. Learning about of bunch of people and places that you have never known or heard of can be somewhat abstract to the young wandering mind.  ( the heavy book thing doesn’t help either ) I have always been a visual learner and to be honest I learned more from watching TV about history than a book when I was a teen. Television may not have been the most accurate at times but at least I could see what a settler may have eaten, lived in, dressed like, well you get the picture. I loved television history series like North & South, Roots, and Bonanza ( yes Bonanza. I had a crush on Hoss)
The Internet provides endless amounts of historical information. Some information is accurate, some isn’t, and some comes at a price or membership. Cemeteries also provide historical information. You can find generations of families names and ages, what branch of military a person served in, what war they fought in, what illness they passed from, and how their families felt at their passing. Cemeteries are quiet, always open and you can set your pace for what you learn. You can even take the time to share history with others by contributing information found on FindAGrave.com. This free website has information about graves from one month ago to hundreds of years past. What can I say, history and cemeteries have become passion!