The Cemetery

The settlement of Bronson and, later, Kalamazoo followed a township model. Settlers reshaped landscapes in predictable ways, and they planted familiar institutions for Euro-American settlers coming from northeastern states: a school, a courthouse, a jail, churches, and a cemetery. Local historians have long believed that Bronson’s first burying ground, located along South Street, was "probably never used for burial purposes." On December 4, 1833, Cyren and Mary Ann Burdick transferred three acres to the Supervisor of Arcadia "to be set apart & reserved as a common burying ground." At the time, Arcadia included the entire northern half of Kalamazoo County. Three years later, the Michigan Legislature renamed  one township and it settlement, "Kalamazoo."[1]

The Burdick family represented, in microcosm, the alienation of Native American land and the U.S. government's bureaucratic process of transforming tribal land into the individual private properties of white settlers. Born in Waitsfiled, Vermont, Cyren Burdick left New England about 1832 as an agent for his brother who purchased land from Titus Bronson. Shortly after his arrival, Burdick constructed a tavern, the Kalamazoo House, and purchased more than 2000 acres from the U.S. Government across Kalamazoo, Van Buren, Ottawa, and Calhoun counties. About three acres of Burdick's land in Section 22 of Township 2 South Range 11 West became the village cemetery.[2]

Who was buried in the old cemetery?

Local historians have disagreed about the identity and location of the first settler burial in Bronson since the nineteenth century. In History of Kalamazoo County (1880), Samuel Durant states that the first death in the village occurred at Cyren Burdick’s Kalamazoo House in the fall of 1832. "The person was a man whose name has not been preserved," Durant writes. "He was buried on the lot where Charles Gibbs lived in 1869." That lot, based on an 1867 city directory and F. W. Beers 1873 map, places the burial at the SW corner of Lovell and John Streets. Yet Durant stressed caution. In his footnotes, he described another local tradition in which Joseph Wood, who died at age 72 in 1833, was both the first burial in the village and the first burial in "the new cemetery on West Street." Alex Praus and Robert Brewer follow this second tradition. Inferring a kinship between Joseph Wood and Henry and Charles Wood, Brewer listed him as buried in grave #198 despite this fact not appearing in the 1882 survey notes. Willis Dunbar blended the two together. In his telling, an unnamed boarder at the Kalamazoo House died of cholera that had spread through Michigan during and after the Black Hawk War. This unnamed person, Dunbar writes, "was reputed to have been the first buried in the old South West Cemetery." As with much of the history of this cemetery, a strong element of unwritten tradition—even in the hands of professional historians like Dunbar—is murky.[3]

The only evidence that Joseph Wood was even buried in this cemetery comes from oral tradition by way of Durant's footnote. There is reason to doubt that family members buried Wood in 1833. Cyren Burdick sold the land to Arcadia Township that December, a difficult month for digging under normal winter circumstances. Other early burials, those with headstones in 1882, include Christopher Campbell (1784 - 1834), Rev. Seth Porter (1803-1834), and William King (1810 - 1834). These names, too, should be treated with caution as contenders for dubious historical “firsts.”[4]

The best information on individual burials comes from a survey of cemetery headstones conducted in 1882. These headstones were not representative. Only about 30% of visible graves in 1882 were marked with a headstone. And yet, there is no better source for basic demographic information that this imperfect sample. Males and females were equally represented on headstones. More headstones had dates from the 1840s than any other decade, followed in order by the 1850s, 1830s, and 1860s. The average and median ages at time of death were similar at 26.6 years old and 26 years old. In contrast, infants and babies under age 2 were the most common burial ages. The third most common burial age was 2 years old and 29 years old. Life expectancy in the United States in 1860 was about 39 years.[5]

Lacking death certificates or descriptive newspaper accounts, there exists little information about causes of death beyond the mortality schedules in the 1850 and 1860 U.S. Census. Brewer notes include congestive disorders, dropsy, cholera, consumption, scarlet fever, and "suddenly.”[6]

Closing the cemetery

The rise of two new cemeteries in the 1840s helps explain the drop in known burials as the population grew. Residents in the township organized Grand Prairie Cemetery in 1844. Closer to the village, Kalamazoo residents created Mountain Home Cemetery in 1849. The 17-acre private cemetery represented the cultural wave of the rural or garden cemetery movement. Urbanization, public health concerns, and aesthetic trends precipitated the desire to create picturesque, pastoral atmospheres of planned cemeteries. There was the Cemetery of Père Lachaise (Paris) in 1804, Mount Auburn Cemetery (Cambridge, Massachusetts) in 1831, and Elmwood Cemetery (Detroit) in 1841—and many others.  These tranquil places were planned as quiet refuges from crowded urban spaces and older cemeteries.[7]

In 1862, Riverside Cemetery, a public cemetery drawing on the same cultural movement, was the finishing stroke. If the private cemetery drew away the city's middle and upper class, a public option made the old crowded cemetery obsolete.[8]

While the old cemetery remained as a place name for decades, the Civil War years marked the end of new burials. In 1862, the Board of Health of Kalamazoo Township published a notice in the Gazette prohibiting new burials at the old cemetery. Robert Brewer suggests that the family of Rev. Henry Grert Klyn, who died in 1863, may have gotten around this order. His wife had died of consumption in 1862, and Brewer believed there was evidence to believe an exception had been made to bury the husband with his wife.[9]

Two decades of neglect

Platted "additions" increased on the south side of Kalamazoo in the mid-nineteenth century. Some of the wealthier families removed their loved ones to Mountain Home or Riverside. In 1881, Oliver Edwards oversaw the removal of three family members from the old cemetery to Mountain Home. "The brother died when 16 years old, some 35 years ago," the Gazette reported, "and when taken up the skull was in a good state of preservation, and the hair was white as snow, and grown long; it was quite black when the body was buried." The editor lauded Edwards for contracting with Sweetland, Hunn & Small for a 12-foot monument.[10]

The total number of reburials is unclear. The surveyors in 1882 estimated that about half of the original burials had been removed. When Robert Brewer compared cemetery records a century later, he found no evidence to back up the claim that most—or even half—of the original burials had been reinterred. He recorded only eight transfers to Riverside Cemetery and nine transfers to Mountain Home cemetery. Brewer undercounted in his own research. At the very least, he missed the removal of the Edwards family. But his overall cautionary point remains that if removals were widespread, then they took place without fanfare or a paper trail.[11]

Township officials had a problem in the 1880s. There were about 100 headstones and many family members knew which tree or which rock identified the burial of an infant, a parent, an aunt or uncle, or a friend. Improvements to the space would impede—and perhaps destroy—such local knowledge. Yet voters in 1881 wanted change. They elected candidates who promised to improve the cemetery by thinning out the trees, grading the uneven ground, and building a walkway. Township Clerk A. Sidney Hayes and Supervisor Delos Phillips advised readers to "identify, mark, remove, or otherwise care for" the graves of friends or family. "No radical change in graves properly marked is contemplated," Phillips continued, "but as it will be impossible to grade the surface without possibly obliterating certain inequalities in the grounds by which along friends may be able to identify the spot where loved ones lie buried, we especially request such as desire to call upon either of the undersigned and we will cheerfully lend all assistance in our power."[12]

The next year, Phillips and Hayes announced the board's decision to survey and record the locations of all marked graves. “The township board have decided to make a very decided change in the old West street Cemetery,” Phillips and Hayes wrote, “and desire to ascertain the public sentiment before they commence.” After documenting the headstones, they planned “to sink every head stone preparatory to cultivating to destroy weeds and myrtle to grade and seed this now unsightly square.” There era of the old cemetery was coming to an end.[13]

Notes

[1]. Samuel W. Durant, compiler, History of Kalamazoo County, Michigan (Philadelphia, Penn.: Everts & Abbott, 1880), 211; Liber B, pg. 5-6, Kalamazoo County Register of Deeds, Kalamazoo County Administrative Building;  Annual Reports of the Kalamazoo Village, 1884 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Kalamazoo Publishing Company, 1884), 121; [No first name] UpJohn, "Some Incidents in Kalamazoo's History," Kalamazoo Gazette, October 11, 1903; Court Scrapbook #1, Vertical Files, Local History Room, Kalamazoo Public Library.

[2]. Kalamazoo Gazette, December 16, 1837; Durant, History of Kalamazoo County, Michigan, 213-14; Harry Lieffers Jr., “The History of Kalamazoo to the Panic of 1873,” 30, Papers from the History Seminar of Kalamazoo College, January 1949, Kalamazoo College. Cyren Burdick, U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records [database], accessed November 24, 2024, https://glorecords.blm.gov/search/default.aspx. 

[3]. Durant, History of Kalamazoo County, Michigan, 214; Alexis A. Praus, The Southwest Street Cemetery of Kalamazoo, no date, reprinted from Michigan Heritage 1, no. 2 (winter 1959), Local History Room, Kalamazoo Public Library; Willis F. Dunbar, “Historical Introduction,” in Alexis A. Praus, ed., Robert C. Kedzie, The Cholera in Kalamazoo, no. pp.; Robert L. Brewer, Kalamazoo’s First Cemetery, 1833-1862 (Kalamazoo Valley Genealogical Society, 1987), 48.

[4]. Liber B, pg. 5-6, Kalamazoo County Register of Deeds, Kalamazoo County Administrative Building; “West Street Cemetery Record of Graves,” 1882, City of Kalamazoo.

[5]. Brewer, Kalamazoo’s First Cemetery, 1833-1862; Kalamazoo County Administrative Building; “West Street Cemetery Record of Graves,” 1882, City of Kalamazoo.

[6]. Brewer, Kalamazoo’s First Cemetery, 1833-1862.

[7]. Alex Forist, “Mountain Home Cemetery,” Kalamazoo Public Library, July 2005, last updated April 29, 2014.

[8]. Alex Forist, “Riverside Cemetery,” Kalamazoo Public Library, July 2005, last updated April 29, 2014.

[9]. “New Advertisements,” Kalamazoo Gazette, June 6, 1862; Brewer, Kalamazoo’s First Cemetery, 1833-1862, 31.

[10]. Kalamazoo Gazette, June 29, 30, 1881.

[11].  “West Street Cemetery Record of Graves,” 1882, City of Kalamazoo.

[12]. “To the Public,” Kalamazoo Gazette, August 12, 1881

[13]. “West Street Cemetery,” Kalamazoo Gazette, June 28, 1882; “West Street Cemetery,” June 28, 1882.