Posts Tagged ‘Sue Hunter Weir’
Endorsements of Minnesota as “Exceedingly Bracing” and “ An Asylum for Invalids,” Inspired Hopes to Cure Tuberculosis
By Sue Hunter Weir Now that winter is almost over and it”'s still a little too soon for us to start worrying about mosquitoes and humidity, we can take a short break from complaining about the weather. Complaining about the weather is part and parcel of living in Minnesota, but that wasn”'t always the case. There was a time when Minnesota”'s weather was considered one of the state”'s major attractions. After visiting Fort Snelling in the 1820s, President Zachary Taylor, endorsed our “exceedingly bracing” weather and wrote that the area was “probably the healthiest in the nation.” Four decades later, civic boosters wrote pamphlets encouraging people from the East Coast and Europe to move here because of our invigorating weather. Minnesota was, they claimed, an “asylum for invalids,” the perfect place to recover from tuberculosis. Cemetery”'s first burial was due to death from tuberculosis: a disease without cure [...]
100 Year Old Church is a Treasure within 129 Year Old Legacy and 1500 Years of Welsh Culture
By Sue Hunter Weir Since at least the 1880s, what we now call the Phillips Neighborhood, has been home to thousands of immigrants and their families, many of whom are buried or have relatives buried, in Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery. Their contributions to the city”'s early development are among the reasons why the cemetery is on the National Register of Historic Sites (the only cemetery in Minnesota honored with that designation). Many of those buried in the cemetery, quite literally, built the city of Minneapolis. Their presence is still visible throughout the Phillips Neighborhood most notably in many of the old churches which functioned not only as places of worship but as places where the language and culture of the “old country” was celebrated and preserved. Among those buried in the cemetery are several named Evans, Hughes, Jones, Morris and Williams””most of them the children of Welsh immigrants. (If your house is 100 years [...]
The Hankinson Family
by Sue Hunter Weir The Hankinson family monument is one of the most substantial and well preserved of the cemetery”'s early markers. Although it is now surrounded by many other graves, when Myrtle Hankinson was buried in 1870, the Hankinson family plot was the only one in Section G, near what was then the cemetery”'s northern boundary. Most of the other family plots in use at the time were located near the Lake Street side of the cemetery, but the Hankinsons chose a burial site nearly a block away. Their marker, sitting alone in one full section of the cemetery must have been an imposing site. Myrtle was the six-day-old daughter of Richard H. and Sarah Martin Hankinson. Her parents were married in Minneapolis on January 20, 1868. A little over a year later, in late April 1870, Myrtle was born but died soon after from valvular insufficiency (a heart defect). Four years later, her parents had another daughter, Olive. Olive died on July 29, 1874, at the age of five [...]
