WOOD RIVER, Neb. (AP) - Some residents of Wood River in southern Nebraska have taken time to remember people they didn’t know, unnamed people who died while passing through or who hadn’t yet put down roots in the farming community.
About 40 people gathered Sunday at Wood River Cemetery to dedicate a new marker. Cemetery board president Steve Arnett said it recognizes and honors “some folks who passed away in a time when maybe there wasn’t time to honor and recognize them.”
Small stone squares etched with crosses mark several graves beneath pine trees on the north side of the cemetery. Nearly 20 or more Russian immigrants are believed to have been buried there, some as long ago as 1873. What killed them is another part of the mystery.
Cemetery records list the graves but don’t contain names of the people, according to Kearney television station NTV (https://bit.ly/1UcnA9P ).
“They probably were poor folks traveling through the area, (or) recent immigrants to the U.S. - no money, buried into a pauper’s area of the cemetery,” Arnett said.
Former cemetery caretakers told local historian Donna Moyer and others about the graves. Moyer said she talked to cemetery board members, who then sought help from the Wood River Community Foundation to buy a granite marker.
The new marker says: “In Remembrance of the Souls of Unknown Russians and Others Who Sleep Here.”
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Information from: NTVV-TV, https://www.nebraska.tv
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