Tales from Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery: 206th in a series
By SUE HUNTER WEIR
The caretaker’s cottage is a wonderful place. The two front rooms were built in 1871, which means it may well be the oldest existing stone building in South Minneapolis outside of Fort Snelling. The back room was built during the Great Depression by workers employed by the Works Progress Administration, a program designed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to create jobs for displaced workers.
But it’s not just the structure that’s interesting. The inside of the building is something of a way-back machine. There are artifacts and relics dating back in some cases to the 1870s. None of the items are of any great monetary value, but they capture a piece of Minneapolis’ history that might otherwise have been lost.
The Layman family, the cemetery’s original owners, were prodigious recordkeepers. There are dozens of ledgers in which they recorded the sales of cemetery plots, some for as little as 50 cents. There are Lot and Block cards which show who’s buried in every grave (not a small task to maintain, given that there are currently more than 22,000 people buried there). There are burial permits dating back to the 1870s, and index cards with the names and burial locations of not only those who are currently buried in the cemetery, but also of the 5,000 or so who were removed.
There is an old filing cabinet that holds correspondence between the caretaker and grave owners. Most of the letters were written in the late 19-teens and early 1920’s, the period of time when some 5,000 people were disinterred and buried elsewhere. Some of the letters are heartbreaking, detailing a family’s inability to relocate their loved one, usually due to poverty or poor health. Others are from families who stubbornly refused to relocate their loved ones because they believed that “eternal rest” meant precisely that.
There is an old safe, so heavy that it would take several strong people to move it a foot. There is a tool cabinet filled with old saws and shovels that was built by Albert Nelson, the cemetery’s caretaker from 1928 until to 1953. There are 200 or so metal flag holders that were made during the 1930s. The small flags that fit in the holders were donated by American Legion Post One to reflect the fact that we are now a country with 50 states, not 48.
There is an odd desk, approximately six feet square with knee holes on two sides, so that co-workers faced each other. It’s so large that it’s a mystery how it came through the door.
The one item that likely has some monetary value is a plat book that was created during the Depression. Its vellum pages show the location of every grave, and the names of those buried in each grave are painstakingly hand-lettered in India ink. The graves are hand-tinted: red for veterans, brown for removals, and green for graves that are currently occupied. The plat book in the office is a digitized version of the original which was removed about 20 years ago after the cemetery office was vandalized. The book was not damaged but was moved to a more secure location.
And maybe the best of all is the cemetery’s piano. It was made in 1894 by the Chicago Cable Piano Company and was donated to the cemetery in the 1940s. It was most likely rolled outside for Memorial Day services and other programs. It is in rough shape, some of the trim is broken and several of the ivory key covers are missing. A piano restorer told us that the wood is too brittle for it to be repaired but it’s still a beautiful old thing. At least that’s what many of the 90+ seventh-graders from Northeast Middle School thought when they visited the cemetery in October. In their thank-you notes, several students mentioned that they loved that old piano. One student’s take-away for the day came out of a conversation that we had about why piano keys are no longer made of ivory. He learned, he wrote, that piano keys used to be made out of elephant tusks. A strange thing to remember from a visit to the cemetery but, then again, maybe not.
When the cemetery reopens in the spring you might want to stop in and see some of these treasures for yourself.
Sue Hunter Weir is chair of Friends of the Cemetery, an organization dedicated to preserving and maintaining Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery. She has lived in Phillips for almost 50 years and loves living in such a historic community.
