BARTLEY, Neb. (AP) - “Crisp blue skies. Six-foot-tall red native grasses. Tangled brush so thick you get lost! Tombstones hidden, some fallen over. Others about ready to topple.”
That’s how Kathy Hansen described a pioneer cemetery nestled along the banks of Dry Creek northwest of Bartley before she and her corps of volunteers worked to return respect and reverence to the burial place of settlers, homesteaders, immigrants, prairie farmers … Nebraska’s earliest settlers.
The five-acre cemetery has been mowed and weeded, and tombstones have been righted and repaired.
The McCook Gazette (https://bit.ly/1ZB9E9q ) reports that one tombstone remains in disrepair, however, and it tugs at Kathy’s heart. “Baby Edna’s marker is cement, and it’s crumbling away,” Kathy said quietly, touching the corner of the marker gently. Repair or replacement could be very expensive. Kathy is fearful that someday no one will remember the tiny pioneer child, born and died on a cold Nebraska winter day in 1920.
The restoration and the well-loved cemetery are now worthy of a book — a book that Kathy wrote and illustrated with photographs she took during the cemetery’s renovation. She calls it, “Dry Creek Cemetery — A Pioneer Plot.”
The story of Dry Creek Cemetery starts generations ago, in 1883, when settlers John Phifer and his third wife, Martha, donated five acres of their hard-fought quarter-section of prairie grass for a Methodist Episcopal church and cemetery.
Several of the earliest recorded burials in the cemetery are those of 1-year-old James H. McDowell, born July 7, 1885 and died Oct, 31, 1886; and babies James White, born July 3, 1889 and died July 11, 1889, and Harry White, born, 1897 and died Dec. 13, 1898.
Mr. Phifer died in 1896, followed by Mrs. Phifer in 1907.
The demise of many country churches is blamed on cars and the resulting ability of settlers to travel easily beyond their immediate neighborhoods. Loyalties to isolated country churches and cemeteries shifted.
The Dry Creek church was no longer used for services after 1919 or so; the most recent burials appear to be in the 1940s. All that remains of the wood-frame church, located outside the woven wire fence of the cemetery, is a chunk of the concrete foundation and stairs.
About 50 years later, Kathy Hansen’s mother, Leona Wight Rosier, learned from a friend, Janice Teter McGregor, formerly of Bartley, that the Dry Creek Cemetery could perhaps be officially designated a “pioneer cemetery.” Also, because the pioneer cemetery appeared to have been abandoned and neglected for at least 20 years, the county could be required to perform some preservation and maintenance of the cemetery if a petition seeking the same was signed by at least 35 adult residents of the county.
The little Dry Creek Cemetery fit the criteria. 1. That it was founded, or the land upon which it is situated was given, granted, donated, sold or deeded to the founders of the cemetery, prior to Jan. 1, 1900. 2. That it contains the grave or graves of a person or persons who were homesteaders, immigrants, prairie farmers, pioneers, sodbusters, first-generation Nebraskans or Civil War veterans. And 3. That it has been generally abandoned and neglected for at least 20 years.
Meeting those stipulations, Red Willow County would be required to mow the cemetery before Memorial Day each year, and to erect a historical marker with name and date at the site of the cemetery. That sign went up in 1993.
It was suggested too, that a directional marker be placed at the nearest state highway. “I’m still working on that one,” Kathy says.
Another 20-some years later, as the sign erected in 1993 started to show wear, Kathy began to feel a compulsion to continue what her mother had started. On a cold November day in 2014 — no rattlesnakes — she and her husband, Ron, went to investigate and photograph the cemetery overgrown with native grasses and weeds and shadowed by draping cedar tree branches.
What they found was disheartening. Stones in the tall grass were leaning, or toppled over. Some were damaged, hard or impossible to read. Some were simply hard to find.
In the spring of 2015, Steve Downer, the county’s District 2 commissioner, mowed the cemetery and the strip of land where the remaining church foundation hides in tall grass between the cemetery and the county road ditch.
Ron and Steve erected a new sign to replace the faded one, and Kathy planned a work day in May. Kathy’s corps of volunteers — “I just do what she tells me to do,” Ron says, grinning. — came with spades, hoes, levels, mowers and a skid loader to clean up around the stones and reset those that had tipped or fallen over. They divided and transplanted yellow and purple irises, tall and short.
Kathy painted the fading letters on the grave marker of a Civil War veteran.
Ron, Andy Downer, Mike Sides and Carsen and Dylan Gress mowed.
After trimming the drooping branches of the cedar tree, volunteers discovered three sets of initials stamped into a concrete border. Three more graves …
“There is no plat to the cemetery,” Kathy says. There are, more than likely, more graves, unmarked …
Kathy has placed red silk poinsettias on the graves at Christmas time, and flags on Memorial Day.
Kathy researched family names in the cemetery, and contacted descendants and borrowed, copied and laminated photographs of as many of the pioneers as she could. Roberta Carpenter has been a great help with genealogy, Kathy said. This will be the second Memorial Day that she has placed the photographs at the grave markers.
Kathy’s book details the lives and deaths of those buried at Dry Creek Cemetery. One couple married in 1880 and had 16 children, 12 of whom lived to attend their parents’ 50th anniversary “basket dinner.” One couple had four sons — not a one of which ever got married.
There are two Civil War veterans.
One settler was born in Prussia in 1862 and immigrated to Nebraska. He committed suicide in 1914.
One settler burned to death inside his soddy.
On the page of her book that she labeled “Pioneer Heartbreak,” Kathy writes that one settler died young, at 23 years of age. His baby boy died just a year later.
A young mother died, leaving her husband to care for three children.
A young couple buried their only child at Dry Creek Cemetery.
Babies were born, and babies died. Some stones are labeled as baby stones, but they have no names. Sometimes a twin survived; sometimes neither lived long. “Darling Lizzie” died at age 12 of measles and pneumonia.
Little Nellie Long, one year old, was buried at Dry Creek in 1898, her parents years later in the Colfax Cemetery in the State of Washington.
On one page in her book, Kathy repeats a quote very often engraved on babies’ graves: “Sleep on sweet babes and take they rest. God calls away when He thinks best.”
“There is such sadness here,” Kathy says.
Yes, sad stories in death. But, through the efforts of Kathy and Ron and their volunteers, and on the pages of Kathy’s book, the lives of these settlers and their families won’t be forgotten.
Les Schmidt’s great-grandparents are buried at Dry Creek, Kathy said, and Les has supported the restoration with generous donations. Others who have made contributions, she said, are Allen and Wayne Wight, Ken Rosier, Joan Sides and Pat Redfern.
Kathy writes in her book: “Dry Creek Cemetery, Established 1883. Sturdy pioneers of the past lie here in marked graves. This cemetery is also a memorial to brave deceased pioneers resting here in unmarked graves.”
Family names in Dry Creek Cemetery are:
Ault, Crawmer, Hahn, Huntwork, Kinnison, Long, McDowell.
Phifer, Premer, Probasco, Schmidt, Teeters.
Trissel, White, Wight, Wolf and Wolfe.
Family names from lists of unmarked graves gathered before Kathy’s preservation efforts also include Hamler, Kenneson, Kimball and Peters. An earlier notation reads, “Four posts and 10 unmarked graves.”
___
Information from: McCook Daily Gazette, https://www.mccookgazette.com
Please read our comment policy before commenting.