Patton's Procession to Far West Burial Ground
-Image provided courtesy of Henry Inouye, Jr., © 2002
Tradition suggests that more than 200 early church members and family died and were buried in the Far West Burial Ground, in Caldwell County, Missouri, during the Mormon period, 1836-1839. Anticipating an extensive gathering to the surrounding area, W.W. Phelps purchased property for a cemetery about one half mile northwest of the Far West town square. The original land entry was made 8 August 1836. As the population of Far West grew to around 5,000, a large cemetery comprised of approximately twenty-four acres developed on this land. Joseph F. Smith was born near the cemetery location next to the schoolhouse lot in the north east quarter of Far West. Alvin Dyer provided the following directions, "One will reach the school lot by going north a half mile from the Temple Lot at Far West and then west one mile." - Refiner's Fire.
An effort to locate some of the grave sites was initiated through a cooperative effort, involving the Community of Christ, as owners of the property, John Whitmer Historical Association and Mormon Historic Sites Foundation, of Utah. Due to wet conditions during the time of these explorations, interpretation of gathered data remains ambiguous.
Mike Riggs led tours of the Burial Ground during John Whitmer Historical Association Annual Meeting, 1998.
This property is owned by the Community of Christ. The Community of has recently declared the burial ground as a historic site. An effort will be made over the next couple of years to place an appropriate monument at the approximate location of these graves. If you would like to assist with efforts to erect a monument for those buried in the Far West Cemetery, please contact, Lachlan Mackay, Director of Community of Christ Historic Sites, temple@ncweb.com
Contact Mike Riggs by E-Mail at: bms@ecksor.net
Hamilton Woman Tells of Desecration of Pioneer Graves After Visiting Approximately 100 Rural Cemeteries in Northwestern Missouri – Valuable Historical Data Often Lost.
Hamilton, MO., April 30
April 30- From a friend who had been out on a quest for ancestral data. Her search took her back to Ohio to the pioneer farms of her pioneer ancestors where she knew that they had been burial plots in her family lines. What she found was not an isolated case.
This was her story. For five generations, the ancestral grave-plots on the Ohio farm had been protected and undisturbed because members of the family lived on the farm. Then the farm was sold. The new owner wanted that grave yard for farm production, hence he took the old slabs and piled them up against the fence, and proceeded to plow the ground over the dead below.
In course of time. he needed just. such stones for utilitarian uses about his farm yard, hence some of the stones were used (or stepping stones in the muddy yard. one for a door step to thc kitchen and another made a door step to the chicken house. When the researcher came to the old farm, she was able :to get all the dates and names from the stones. now far removed from the sacred dust which long ago was absorbed into the soil. But the farm owner was decent enough to give her the old stones, and she had them. |carted to another larger cemetery to be placed with their kin of more recent death.
Examples Nearer Home.
Care for Rural Plots Needed.
Suggests a Community Project.
Right here in Missouri, there are plenty of instances of small family burial plots which have been plowed over when the farm passed into the hands of strangers. The gravestones were either piled-up at the field corners or destroyed by time or purpose, as they stood in the way of the ploughshare. In some cases, the remains of the dead were removed, before the family turned the farms to strangers, but often this was not done.
At the old Mormon site of Far West, not far from my home in Hamilton, is a field in which lie the remains of about forty-five Mormons who died over 100 years ago when Far West had a population of over 3,000 people. Today it is in corn, year after year. When the Mormons were driven out of this county and state, they left their dead with gravestones. The incoming settlers promptly used the gravestones for foundation stones for their log cabins or for other utilitarian ends. It is said that a few such stones with inscriptions may still be found in that community under old houses. Today no one knows exactly where this group of Mormon dead sleeps, so completely did the new settlers destroy the sanctity of the city of the dead.
Not only do we see desecration of pioneer graves in small family plots here graves are plowed over, but also in larger pioneer rural graveyards where graves are grossly neglected. I have visited nearly 100 rural graveyards in Northwest Missouri in my search for genealogical and local history data, and I know what I am talking about. Most of them are in a wretched plight; gravestones down, often covered with deep layers of soil until dug out, broken so as to defy deciphering of data or else weather-worn into blank faces. Great limbs of fallen trees, unkempt rose bushes and silver poplar, now grown wild, barred easy passage from one grave to another. Snakes have raised their young undisturbed for decades in some of these graveyards. In some of these graveyards where our party went in our self-appointed, grave census, there lay soldiers of several wars who had gone to the defense of their native land; but on Memorial day no flag and no bouquet of flowers rests on their forgotten graves.
In many of these now unused rural cemeteries, the community excuses the neglect by simply saying that the dead lying there have no family representatives left to care for the graves. Hence nobody else cares. Surely in these communities there are clubs or church groups which might look after the last resting place of those honored pioneers, even though unrelated. What a wonderful project it would be for an extension or a 4-H club to take over one of these neglected graveyards, to do something toward the order, the upkeep of graves and the respectable preservation of grave records before it is forever too late.
Bertha Booth
Some little work along this line could still be done, before 1949 Memorial day rolls around, in tidying up these desolate, pioneer, God-forsaken rural graveyards. The pioneers who lie there were brave human beings and deserve fitting respect in death. Bertha Booth
- [The Kansas City Star, Sunday, 1 May 1949.]