Cemetery Records of Crow Wing County, Minnesota

CEMETERY RECORDS of CROW WING COUNTY, MINNESOTA by EARL C. LESLIE and LAURA L. LESLIE DEDICATED to the memory of RUSSELL L. EMERY A brilliant scholar and a dear friend PREFACE Cemeteries fall into three categories: the private, the religious, and the secular. Since no cemeteries existed when the first settlers arrived here, they had to bury the dead on their own land or on a neighbor's land. Two examples of the private type are Thorp-Heald and Hagen-Arnestad. When there were enough settlers to build a church, these private burial sites, or other unused land, was given or sold to the religious organization for that purpose. The church cemeteries in Crow Wing County are: St. John-Holy Cross, St. Francis Assisi, St. Mathias, Holy Family, Bethel Lutheran, Immanuel Lutheran, Our Saviour's Lutheran, Cedarbrook, Riverside Union, and Carroll. Secular or community type cemeteries were the last to appear. These were cooperative ventures where a group of settlers donated land or pooled their resources to buy it, with the idea of controlling it in a non sectarian manner. Some examples are Lakewood, Pequot Lakes, Memorial Gardens, Scandia, and Evergreen in Brainerd. Crow Wing County has forty three known cemeteries. Of these, fourteen are located in the following villages or cities: Bay Lake, Baxter, Evergreen in Brainerd, Lakewood in Crosby,Scandia near Deerwood, Pinewood near Cross Lake, Pine Ridge near Emily, Ft. Ripley, Garrison, Woodland near Ironton, Pequot Lakes and Our Saviour's Lutheran in Pequot Lakes, Jenkins, and Greenwood in Nisswa. The other twenty nine cemeteries of the county are found in rural areas. The only ones which may be difficult to find are Carroll, Pine Knoll, Fairfield, Hillside, Pine Grove, Oak Hill, and Wolford. The two oldest cemeteries in this county are St.John-Holy Cross and St.Francis Assisi in Crow Wing State Park. These date back to the 1850's when the former became an Episcopal possession and the latter a Roman Catholic possession. The land in both cases was originally owned by William Aitkin, the fur trader, then by Donald McDonald, and finally by a real estate partner- ship. The third oldest cemetery was one in East Brainerd which existed from 1870 to 1878. Afterwards, it ceased to be used, was forgotten, and only discovered again in 1944 when some workmen unearthed it while excavating on Northern Pacific Rail- road property. The remains thus exposed where reinterred in Evergreen Cemetery of Brainerd, the fourth oldest cemetery in the county, which had its beginning on May 16, 1879. Nineteen of the county cemeteries were formed between 1880 and 1900. Among the earliest were Ft. Ripley, Oak Hill, Pine Grove, St. Mathias, Oakland, Vaale, Bethel Lutheran, Immanuel Lutheran, Cedarbrook, and Scandia. Nineteen more were formed between 1900 and 1920. Of these, the latest were Holy Family, Maple Grove, Thorp-Heald, Baxter, Lakewood, and Swanburg. The two newest cemeteries, both formed in the 1950's,are Evergreen in Center Township and Memorial Gardens in Unorganized Territory. In the number of burials, Evergreen in Brainerd far exceeds all the other county cemeteries combined. Its population in I PREFACE 1981 was estimated to be somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand. Lakewood is next with perhaps three thousand seven hundred, then Memorial Gardens with one thousand, Pequot Lakes with about seven hundred, and Scandia and Pine Ridge with over five hundred each. The cemeteries with the least number of burials are Wolford, Thorp-Heald, Hagen-Arnestad, Fairfield, Carroll, Pine Knoll, Hillside, Pine Grove, St.John-Holy Cross, and St. Francis Assisi. All are unused at present except for Hillside which has an occasional burial. Other cemeteries that see little use are Immanuel Lutheran, Jenkins, Maple Grove, Oak Hill, Mission, and Norwood. Between 1925 and 1950 many of our rural cemeteries were so neglected that they became veritable jungles of brush and weeds. Tombstones were tipped over and broken by vandals, carted away by souvenir hunters, and even used by neighboring farmers for paving stones. Then in the 1950's, the descendants of the early pioneers got together to clean up the grounds, establish rules, and set high enough prices on the lots to assure perpetual care. Today these rural cemeteries have become idyllic retreats we can all respect and enjoy. The sole exceptions are found in Wolford, St. John-Holy Cross, Pine Knoll, Carroll, Fairfield, Pine Grove, and Hagen-Arnestad. We hope that the property owners of these small cemeteries will exhibit similar initiative in restoring them to their pristine beauty. Cemetery records can be of two kinds: written reports found in family Bibles, newspaper obituaries, registers, notebooks, Journals, and card files kept by churches, cemetery associa- tions, town clerks, morticians, fraternal, military, and governmental bodies, or they can be inscriptions carved by some rela- tive or professional engraver on wood, slate, cement, metal, or granite. Many written records have been lost or destroyed by fire, but where they do exist, they usually give the name of the deceased, date of burial, place of death, name of the mortician, and the lot and block numer in the cemetery plat map. To gain more information from written records, one would have to go to family Bibles, newspaper obituaries, or government pension files. Many inscribed memorials to the dead have also perished or proved indecipherable. We have only to think of wooden headboards and crosses that have rotted away, slate and cement that has crumbled to powder, metal that has corroded, and even granite that has eroded over the years or suffered breakage. Where plaques, markers, tombstones, or monuments exist and are readable, they usually give the name of the deceased, full or partial birth data, full or partial death data, and quite often additional information, such as the relation- ship of the deceased to others buried in the vicinity, to the birthplace, to religious, military and fraternal orders. In assembling the records in this volume, we have personally visited every cemetery listed in the table of contents, copied II PREFACE inscriptions from all readable tombstones, copied written records from all available sources, and supplemented this with information gleaned from family Bibles, newspaper obituaries, census microfilm, and historical narratives. Still there will be persons whom we have missed either because the records were inaccessible or unreadable. In seeking such persons, we advise a visit to the priest or pastor of the church with which that person was affiliated, or a visit to a mortician who may be able to furnish addresses of cemetery secretaries, town clerks, fraternal, military, or governmental groups that might provide aid. In many of these cases, it will be found that the miss- ing person is in fact here but listed under some variant spell- ing of the surname. Examples are Ryappy as Rappe, Laeti as Lahti or Lehti, Gerbich as Grbich, Grunhagen as Gruenhagen or Greenhagen, Luby as Lubovich, Nielsen or Nilsson as Nelson, Schmidt as Smith, and etc. Where data proves contradictory, one should seek corroboration from other sources, always re- membering that any data is only as trustworthy as the informant who gave it. We have designated veterans of military service by abbreviations which show the branch they served in or the war in which they took part. The oldest GAR post in this area was the Pap Thomas Post Number 30, founded in 1884, and having at one time over one hundred thirty members. If it be asked why we omitted Evergreen Cemetery in Brainerd from this collection, we offer two reasons: first, because its size would require a volume two or three times as large as this one, and second, because the Crow Wing County Genealogical Society and Evergreen Cemetery Association are currently work- ing together on the reproduction of these records. We have chosen instead to add three cemeteries from bordering counties in which many Crow Wing County pioneers are buried. The first is Kedron in Cass County. It was the site of a church about 1900 and is West of Pequot Lakes. The second is Gull River in Cass County. It was the site of the first village in that county, dates back to the 1880's, and is West of Baxter and Brainerd. The third is Bennettville, near Farm Island Lake, in Aitkin County. It was founded about 1898 and is East of Bay Lake. Here are a few statistics which may be of interest. In the matter of name frequencies, we found Johnson to be the most common, followed by Peterson, some distance back, then Anderson, Olson, Carlson, Larson, Nelson, Wood, DeRosier, Perpich, Erick- son, Magnan, Smith, Schmidt, Harrison, Hendrickson, and Miller. The preponderance of Scandinavian names is obvious and tells us something about the ethnic background of the people in this county. In the matter of epidemics, we found that more people died from the influenza-pneumonia epidemic of 1918-1919 than from any other cause before or since. The worst loss of life from an accident occurred on February 5, 1924 when forty one men drowned in the Milford Iron Ore Mine near Crosby. The III PREFACE cause was a collapsed tunnel which filled with fifteen feet of water and quicksand within a few minutes. Most of the victims are buried in Lakewood Cemetery. We believe that the material in this book will prove to be a valuable research tool to genealogists, ethnologists, statis- ticians, and historians, but more important, it preserves for our generation, and all future generations, a priceless heritage that otherwise might eventually be lost. For those who contem- plate a similar project, we would like to point out that this one involved travelling 700 miles, doing 150 hours of field work, 150 hours of research, 300 hours of manuscript prepara- tion, arranging for publication, advancing money for printing, and finally advertising and selling the product.

Load more