ST. CLAIR, Minn. — A “DEAD END” sign is the only marker on the road leading to McPherson Union Cemetery.
The modest graveyard in rural St. Clair, about 10 miles southeast of Mankato, rests on a sloped field descending toward an opening in a wiry fence.
Cars zoom by on Highway 83, but few will pull off and loop around to this resting place. Apart from the American Legion coming out to honor veterans, including those of the Civil War and World War I, the site garners few visitors.
McPherson Union’s last recorded burial was in 2000. Time had taken its toll on the cemetery when Greg Wheelock first visited about a decade ago. Fencelines were waging losing battles against brush. Grave markers were cracked, tipped over or sunken into the Earth.
Some people hunt or fish in retirement, Wheelock said. He set out to restore a largely forgotten cemetery.
Caretakers like Wheelock, whether individuals or entrusted groups, maintain and restore rural cemeteries across Minnesota. In holding nature at bay, they keep the people who are buried there from being lost to time.
Find a grave becomes fix a grave
Wheelock started using Find a Grave, a virtual gravesite database, while researching his family’s genealogy. Millions of users create memorials on the site, submitting names, locations, biographical details and images of grave markers.
Many memorials are missing images, Wheelock noticed. Someone, perhaps a family member living on the other side of the world, would start a virtual grave page and request an image.
Fulfilling these requests became Wheelock’s hobby, which brought him to McPherson Union Cemetery.
“I came out here and realized this place needs more help than me just taking pictures,” he said.
His help went beyond beating back brush. Over the last decade, Wheelock immersed himself in historical records, comparing who was buried at the cemetery against what markers were still visible.
Through this process, he placed 55 engravings in 2025 alone. Each etched tile has the name of a person who’d been laid to rest at McPherson Union.
“For me it’s kind of the completion of a process out here,” he said. “As I finish one project, upright another marker, it’s like, ‘OK what’s next?’ I’ll find out there used to be a marker here, so where is it? It’s trying to, for lack of other terms, bring this cemetery back to life.”
About an hour’s drive to the north, parishioners at a rural Carver County church took on a similar cemetery restoration. A 15-year research project at St. Bernard’s Catholic Church culminated in the placement of plaque markers honoring more than 400 people who weren’t previously memorialized at the site, said Roger Storms, one of the project’s leaders.
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The cemetery’s first burial was in 1857, predating the church by about 20 years. By 1890, St. Bernard’s needed a new cemetery to meet the growing parish’s needs.
Nature took its course at the old cemetery. Vandals lent an unhelpful hand, tipping over headstones about 70 years ago, Storms said.
Combing through church records written in Latin or German, parishioners accounted for as many burials as they could find. They enlisted Sister Irene Feltz, a teacher with the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Mankato, to translate texts for them.
What emerged from the records was a history of pioneer hardships, Storms said. Losing a child at a young age wasn’t uncommon back then.
As they were burying loved ones below ground, they endured a plague above ground. The church was built during Minnesota’s grasshopper plague, descriptions of which sound apocalyptic.
Swarms looked like “snowstorms coming toward their fields from the west,” according to the Minnesota Historical Society. “Then they heard a roar of beating wings and saw that what seemed to be snowflakes were in fact grasshoppers. In a matter of hours, knee-high fields of grass and wheat were eaten to the ground by hungry hoppers.”
The locals who pushed through all of this deserve to be remembered, Storms said. They’re the reason the church exists.
“One of the things we owe to our ancestors is memorializing them, keeping a memory of what their efforts were,” he said.
The need for caretakers
Maintaining a rural cemetery often falls on volunteers, sometimes organized in an association or board structure. Sakatah Cemetery in Waterville has a board, for example, that oversees a historic site dating back to 1862.
This board relies on a perpetual care fund to support maintenance, which goes beyond mowing grass. Weeds need to be sprayed, insurance isn’t cheap and trees are vulnerable to storms.
Interest income doesn’t add up like it used to, the board notes, so donations are needed to cover short- and long-term projects. As much as money, cemeteries also need people to continue managing them, otherwise Mother Nature does the managing.
In the case of Zion Lutheran Church’s cemetery in Chippewa County, one family has served as caretakers for four generations. Jim Aamot is the latest in the role, with his wife, Lynette, as partner.
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They tidy up each year. Little things add up, Aamot said, like when planted flowers become overgrown or artificial flowers get forgotten.
There is no active congregation keeping a close eye on the site, located about 45 miles west of Willmar. The church next to the cemetery, finished in 1889, hasn’t been open since 1981.
Local residents formed the Zion Restoration Society in 1996 to restore the church. The cemetery is a separately run piece of land.
Neglecting the land would mean losing pieces of local history. That’s why cemeteries need regular upkeep, Aamot said.
“There are a lot of cemeteries that are just lost and overgrown and forgotten about, some in my area,” he said. “If you lose them, they’re gone. People forget about where they were.”
In Storms’ eyes, preserving cemeteries and the associated records show we’re “good stewards” of land for the people who came before us. Those people may not have had the money for a granite headstone designed to stand the test of time, but their names will be preserved on the St. Bernard’s cemetery plaques.
Like Aamot, Storms and Wheelock know of cemeteries near them that met different fates than St. Bernard’s and McPherson Union. Upkeep requires caretakers, a scarce commodity in rural areas, especially when each generation gets farther removed from the first people buried at cemeteries.
But as Wheelock can attest to, no one needs a family connection to take an interest in a cemetery. There’s always work to be done, even something as simple as picking up sticks on a walk. The solitude can be quite nice, he said.
“It’s actually a pretty calm place to work,” he said. “It’s peaceful. There’s nobody talking back to you. That’s where I find peace, solitude, gratification.”
The post ‘Good Stewards’: Groups honor the deceased, history through cemetery preservation appeared first on MinnPost.
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