Today, an untold story will be told.
The forgotten, long departed souls will be remembered.
And I will document a cemetery classified by the State of Minnesota as "unrecorded."
In the middle of a public park located in the middle of a subdivision in the town we once lived in lies the Farmington Middle Creek Historic Cemetery.
A natural footpath winds its way up a small hill.
The combination of melting snow, fallen leaves from a season ago and mud created a very slippery walking surface. It's easy to navigate though, since the leaves have not yet grown back and I can clearly see where I'm going. However, plenty of large trees had been uprooted and fallen.
And then, the path leads here.
I pause at the decaying sign with the names of the two dozen people buried at this site. Many are children. Young, young children whose innocent lives were cut short due to disease. I wondered how long it had been since their names were last spoken.
The cemetery, once associated with a church, interred people from 1859-1906. Record-keeping from that time wasn't thorough so I wasn't able to pinpoint what happened to the church, or why the cemetery was left to be reclaimed by nature.
It's been abandoned for over 60 years. Nothing can be built here, as its hallowed ground. The site just sort of exists, in between the realms of time as modern families raise their children with this cemetery in their peripheral.
Without headstones, it was hard to determine where the graves were. As I walked, I repeated, "sorry, sorry everybody." I did find this one, topped over and bearing the names of two young children. One passed away at age 2, the other at the age of 28 days. I thought of the anguish felt by their parents, and what a struggle life must have been in the mid-1800s when Minnesota was still considered an untamed, wild frontier.
It is my hope that this post memorializes the souls of these people, as I believe the best way to honor the departed is to speak their name in remembrance. They were important to someone back then, and now over a century later, they have left their mark on me.
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