An Elusive Tombstone

No. 225 in the series Tales from Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery

By SUE HUNTER WEIR

This started as a mystery story. During its research, the mystery was more or less solved. The solution seemed like it would be complicated, but it turned out to be quite simple.

HAZEL ANDERSON AUGUST 5, 1894 – MARCH 22, 1915
The story began when Powderhorn Park Neighborhood residents, Heidi and Renae, found a headstone in their backyard. They’d moved into their house about three years before. Neighbors told them that their house had been unoccupied for about ten years before they moved in. When they were weeding and clearing out scrub trees in the overgrown northwest corner of the yard, they found a speckled red granite headstone face down in the dirt. It was a marker for Hazel Anderson who had died more than a century earlier.
A friend of theirs did a little research and found a young woman with the same name and birthdate on Pioneer and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery website. Heidi and Renae visited the Cemetery office and found that there was a young woman with a matching name and death date buried in the Cemetery; according to the card file records. Hazel died on March 22, 1915, from endocarditis at the age 20.
She was the oldest child of Swedish immigrants, Axel and Anna Anderson. Hazel was born in Minneapolis on August 5, 1894. She had been ill for a number of months before she died. She appears not to have graduated from high school since when the 1910 federal census was taken, she was 15 years old and working as a “cash girl” in a department store.
Hazel’s mother, Anna died less than two years later on December 11, 1916, from double pneumonia. Her husband and three children survived her. Their son Andrew was about 18, daughter Signe was 15, and daughter Mildred was ten. Anna was buried in an unmarked grave not far from where Hazel had been buried in Block A.
So, the question was, why wasn’t Hazel’s headstone set on her grave? Was her father planning on getting a matching marker for his wife and, perhaps, ran out of money? Was he ill? Or too grief-stricken to deal with having her marker set? There seemed to be any number of possible explanations—all of them sad but, as it turns out, none of them were true.

MASS EXHUMATION INCOMPLETE
The answer turned out to be much simpler. When Axel died on March 10, 1932, from heart disease, Mildred, the youngest daughter, purchased a block of graves in Crystal Lake Cemetery. Axel was buried there on March 18, 1932. So, too, were Hazel and Anna. They were among the 5000+ people who were disinterred from Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery and reburied in other cemeteries. For some reason, their removal was never recorded in the Cemetery’s records and they were still in the Cemetery’s active file. In 1932, Mildred was still living in the family’s home and it is likely that she arranged to have the marker moved to the spot where it has remained for more than 90 years.
After Andrew, Axel and Anna’s son, died in the Soldiers Home on March 16, 1952, he became the fourth member of the family to be buried in the family plot at Crystal Lake. Each of their graves have matching flat markers. There is a fifth grave with Mildred’s name and birth year on it but no death date. There is no record of her having been buried there, but that is a mystery for another time.
“Gone, but she certainly will not be forgotten.”
So, what will happen to Hazel’s first marker? Heidi and Renae have decided that they would like to keep it. It is in the garden of their home, the home where Hazel spent the last five years of her life and which the family owned until 1932. It will serve as a reminder of the young woman who once lived there. It has been almost 110 years since Hazel died, and she may be gone, but she certainly will not be forgotten.

Sue Hunter Weir is chair of Friends of the Cemetery, an organization dedicated to preserving and maintaining Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery. She has lived in Phillips for almost 50 years and loves living in such a historic community.

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