‘Tales from Pioneers & Soldiers Cemetery’ Archives
22,000+ Rest, Undisturbed
Tales of Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery By SUE HUNTER WEIR In the cemetery’s early days, the cost of maintenance and repair was paid for voluntarily by the families of those buried there. By 1919, the cemetery was filled to capacity. Many families had moved away and some were simply too poor to continue to pay an annual maintenance fee. The cemetery fell into serious disrepair. On May 23, 1919, the Minneapolis City Council, at the request of some South Minneapolis residents and merchants, voted to close Layman’s Cemetery to further burials. The ordinance did not condemn the cemetery, which would have required the removal and relocation of more than 27,000 people. The ordinance simply stated that no burials would be allowed after August 1, 1919. Nonetheless, there were rumors that the cemetery had to be vacated and the remains of 5,000 to 6,000 people were removed. The deeds to the graves for those removals were returned to the Layman Land Trust, and became the property of [...]
Lawrence Wenell, a superior soldier and civilian, remembered.
By SUE HUNTER WEIR Lawrence Wenell had an elementary-school education. He loved baseball, and according to his mother, he was very good at it. Private Carl Wenell laying flowers at the grave of his brother Lawrence Wenell.: Courtesy Wenell family Lawrence was born on July 5, 1893, the oldest of August and Laura Wenell”™s fourteen children. He attended Irving School, which has since been demolished, but which was located on the corner of 17th Avenue and 28th Street. By the time that he was 17 years old he was working as a “shirt cutter,” for the Wyman-Partridge Company. In June 1917, he enlisted in the Army. He was assigned to the Battery C 151st Field Artillery, also known as the Gopher Gunners, part of the Rainbow Division. His unit sailed from New York on October 18, 1917, aboard the President Lincoln. Less than five months later, on March 9, 1918, his parents received a telegram from the War Department notifying them that their son had been [...]
Tales from Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery
190th in a series For Want of Breath and Blood By SUE HUNTER WEIR “For want of breath and blood.” With those words Dr. John Cockburn, the city”™s Health Officer, painted a heartbreaking picture of the death of a fragile infant born in 19th century Minneapolis. He wrote those words on the burial permit for Baby Girl Weeks who died on April 3, 1883. She was only two days old. She was not the first of her father”™s children to die. John Warren Weeks and his first wife, Martha, had lost three children. Martha died in childbirth in 1877. John”™s second wife, Elizabeth, was the mother of the unnamed baby girl who died in 1883. John Weeks died from consumption (tuberculosis) five months after his infant daughter died. He was only 39 years old and had outlived four of his children. The marker for six members of the Weeks family--John and Martha Weeks and four infants. Photo by Tim McCall Before the late 19th and early 20th centuries, [...]
