‘Tales from Pioneers & Soldiers Cemetery’ Archives
Tales from Pioneers & Soldiers Cemetery: 207th in a Series
City Leaders at an Impasse, Garbage Piles Grow In the cemetery’s early years, the city’s center was located near what is now the intersection of Hennepin and Washington Avenues. A visit to the cemetery was regarded as a day-long excursion. Over the next 50-75 years the city moved steadily southward and the land around the cemetery, and on occasion the cemetery itself, had been involved in disputes over land use near Lake Street. The most obvious dispute came to a head in the late 19-teens, early 19-twenties, when an effort was made to vacate parts of the cemetery and develop the land for commercial purposes. More recently, in the mid-1960s, one City Council Member, most likely unaware that there are 22,000 people buried there, floated the idea that the cemetery would make an ideal location for the new South High School. Both ideas failed. Cemetery in the 1930s. Looking southeast toward Cedar Avenue and Lake Street. Photo from Library of Congress Collection. John [...]
Artifacts and Curios (and a Piano)
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 [...]
Unknown, Perhaps Unwanted
Twenty of the 78 unknowns are buried beneath a marker provided by the University of Minnesota. The marker was dedicated on September 9, 2012. Photo: Tim McCall Tales From Pioneers & Soldiers Cemetery 206th in a Series By SUE HUNTER WEIR There are 78 people buried in the cemetery whose last names were recorded simply as “unknown.” They might more accurately have been called “unidentified,” since it’s likely that someone, somewhere must have known them. But no one stepped forward to claim them and most, though not all, were buried at the expense of the county in the cemetery’s paupers’ section, known as Section H. Newspaper coverage of their deaths was spotty: some deaths appeared to be newsworthy, others not. In a few cases the papers printed a description of the person who had died. An unknown man who died in April 1876 was described as being “about five feet six inches in height, with a strong frame and dark complexion.” It was general enough that [...]
