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Cemetery Is Filling
East-Side Will Be Filled Within Five Years. At the present rate the Eastside cemetery will be filled within another five years. This is the statement of C. H. Rogers for fourteen years sexton at the cemetery, and now assistant. The eight acres at the south edge of the cemetery which was bought a few years ago is now being drawn on and filled, and before much longer another tract will have to be purchased, or else a new cemetery established. This is not because the average death-rate is increasing but because of the growth of the city. The sexton’s records show that for several years there has been an average of sixteen interments a month, but it is now nearly twenty a month . “Last month there were 24 interments,” said Mr. Rogers. “This is the largest number in the history of the cemetery in any one month. A large percent of these were adults, and I believe the extreme hot weather was responsible.” The Eastside cemetery includes 25 acres of land belonging to the association, besides 2 ½ acres in the “Potter’s Field” which belongs to the city. There are, in this “City of the Dead” 3,500 graves, approximately. Prior to 1879, when the Eastside cemetery was first plated, the city burying ground was at the northwest corner of the town, occupying the land between Twelfth and Seventeenth avenues, west of Monroe. For three years people were buried there, and then in 1879, the bodies were moved to the new cemetery, because the old burying ground was located so that water drained from it through the sandy soil down into the town. “I am satisfied that many bodies were not moved when the change occurred,” said Mr. Rogers. “There was no record kept then, and I am certain that many corpses still lie in the old burying ground.” Until a year or two ago no record was kept of the disposition of the bodies in the potter’ field, the city’s part of the cemetery, where those too poor to own lots are buried. They were laid as close together as they could go, with nothing to show where they were put, and no record of them. “Nobody knows how many are buried in this tract,” said Sexton Rogers. “At present this is cut up into numbered lots, and a record is kept, but no headstones or boards mark the graves.” Mr. Rogers is not now actively engaged as sexton, Eli Craig has held that position three years. Rogers was sexton for fourteen years before that. The latter resides near the cemetery, and knows every foot of it. He can tell where every body of any prominence is at rest. The mausoleum, which is to be built in the cemetery, will be erected in the south part of the grounds, in about the center, and on the last street to the south through the grounds. It will be near the new arbor which is to be arected. This was to have been put in this year but will now probably not be erected before next spring.
The Hutchinson News
10/13/07
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