JessiandMatt.net

Earlier this summer, Jessi, the kids, and I took a walk around the oldest cemetery in Jordan. I’ve always wanted to see it, but it actually helped fulfill a requirement for Brownies for Adya. So on a warm summer afternoon we took a walk. The cemetery sits way up on top of a hill in Jordan, next to one of the water towers. Of course, the graveyard is still used today, but I wanted to find the oldest grave there. What we found, is that a lot of the really old graves were in poor condition. Many of the headstones had fallen over or been separated from their graves completely. Some were stacked against trees for lack of a better place to put them. Some were still intact. Below is a photo of the oldest grave we found. I have no idea who the person is, but they died in 1859. Think about that. That was just one year after Minnesota became a state. That was two years before the Civil War. It was just five years after the city of Jordan was founded. It was nice to see the headstone was still intact, although not in the greatest condition.

We also found some evidence in town of some sort of apparent epidemic in town during December of 1869. We found two graves where families had lost more than one young child. Their graves are below.

Finally, of course, we stumbled across a grave of a Civil War Veteran. He apparently was in Company F of the 2nd Minnesota Infantry, which was mustered to service at Fort Snelling on July 8, 1861. It’s not clear from the grave marker when this man died, however.