‘Tales from Pioneers & Soldiers Cemetery’ Archives
Hundreds of Scouts and Friends are Cemetery”'s Caretakers throughout the year
190 Girl Scouts along with Friends of the Cemetery continuing their caretaking helped prepare this sacred place for winter during the 159th Fall season since the Cemetery's first burial. Photos by Tim McCall By Sue Hunter Weir Another season at Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery has ended””its 159th to be exact. With the exception of Veterans Day, Sunday, November 11th, the cemetery will be closed until April 15th, 2013. That doesn”'t mean that work on the cemetery will stop. The next phase of the fence restoration is due to begin shortly””more sections will be removed, restored and returned in the late fall. Over 190 Girl Scouts and their parents volunteered to help put the cemetery to bed for the season. The occasion was the Centennial Day Year of Service by the Mississippi River Valley”'s Minnesota-Wisconsin Chapter of Girl Scouts. Beth Hart, longtime Phillips community activist, organized the event; the girls spent the morning [...]
To Be Remembered
By Sue Hunter Weir Names in Stone Stories in Memory Pictures in Archives Albert Swanson and his sister, Eleanore Chakolis, never knew their great-grandmother or their paternal grandparents but they wanted to make sure that that part of their family”'s history would not be forgotten. In October 2010, Albert and Eleanore, now in their nineties, visited Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery to pay their respects to several family members and to see the three markers that they had arranged to have placed on their relatives”' graves a few weeks earlier. Anna Andersdotter, Albert and Eleanore”'s great grandmother, emigrated from Sweden on September 11, 1887. She was born in a crofter”'s cottage in Norra Vanga, Skaraborg, Sweden in 1822. In 1847, at the age of 25, she married Anders Anderson, and they had seven children. In 1883, Anders died, and in 1887 Anna came to the United States to live with her daughter Clara. Anna was one month [...]
Gettysburg infantryman, James Francis Towner, Remembered and Honored 147 years later
By Sue Hunter Weir In April 1932, members of the Minneapolis Cemetery Protective Association (MCPA) ordered a military marker for James F. Tower, a man they believed to have been a Civil War vet. When the marker arrived they had it set on the grave of a man named John K. Tower where it has been ever since. No one, it seems, noticed that the first name on the marker was James, not John. Private James Francis Towner (not Tower), the man that the MCPA thought that they were honoring, has been buried in an unmarked grave in a different section of the cemetery since 1865. Private James Francis Towner was a veteran of Company K 1st Minnesota Infantry; he was mustered in at Fort Snelling on April 29, 1861. James Towner was one of the 215 (out of 265) men from the 1st Minnesota who were wounded at Gettysburg in July 1863. The inscription on the 1st Minnesota”'s monument at Gettysburg sums up the vital contribution that these men made to the Union cause: “In self sacrificing [...]
