Reflections and the Future

An inadvertent discovery

In the summer of 2024, a backhoe operator struck the buried marble headstone of Jonas Ash. Work stopped. City officials documented the marble tablet. Then the work crew buried it in yellow caution tape where they found it.

This was called an inadvertent discovery, but it should not have come as a surprise. After all, the stated purpose of the 1882 survey had been to know the precise location of all the graves. Eighty years later, local historians placed a historical marker to commemorate Kalamazoo’s “pioneer cemetery,” explain its closure in the 1860s, and narrate its transformation into a public park. And yet the cemetery remains hidden in plain sight. It took a couple decades to reimagine the old cemetery as a park. It has taken more than 130 years to reimagine it as a non-binary space that is as much of a park as it is a cemetery. Residents, city officials, historians, and forensic teams periodically rediscover the cemetery layer. The jolting reminder of its duality is part of the cyclical forgetting, remembering, and forgetting again.

The student-faculty website represents an initial phase of a longer project about this space as a window into Kalamazoo's history. In the fall of 2024, public history students spent the semester asking themselves what local records could reveal about the men, women, and children who lived in Kalamazoo in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. They have also explored how the cemetery and the park serve as portals into broader stories about Kalamazoo in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These are starting points representing a public draft of their research and reflections.

In August 2024, workers discovered this headstone buried lengthwise in South Westnedge Park. Photograph by Dr. Elise MacArthur/WWMT.

The engraving "65 J. F. ASH" refers to the 1882 survey. Photograph by Dr. Elise MacARthur/WWMT.

Footstone for Jonas Ash's grave. Photograph by Dr. Elise MacARthur/WWMT.

A non-invasive study of the grounds

The discovery of Jonas Ash's headstone came as a disappointment for another reason. It served as a test of the digitized 1882 map, but the survey appears to put the headstone much further south. Had the person who translated the surveyor's notes erred? Had we made a new mistake in digitizing this map? Or, in removing and numbering the headstones, had city workers made mistakes in returning them to their proper place? Lingering questions underscore the continuing need to study this place. This will require new methods beyond the historian's toolkit.

A second phase of this public history project involves using non-invasive methods to search for anomalies in the soil with ground penetrating radar (GPR). The goal here is not to reproduce the 1882 survey, test its accuracy, or defer to scientific methods in what began as a humanistic study; rather, this is an opportunity to compare notes created through different epistemological approaches to studying this space. We can also go far beyond the original survey because GPR allows us to detect the burials themselves, including the relatively shallow headstones and deeper coffins. This data can allow us to get an understanding of burial practices in the cemetery as compared to others in Michigan. This second phase of work will begin in the winter of 2024-25 or the spring of 2025.

A GPR survey of the park is unlikely to locate every grave and it cannot identify those still buried here. It should offer a better picture of the scale of the cemetery. This is important. After the inadvertent discovery in the summer of 2024, city workers had to stop work again in November 2024. This time it was human remains. The city preservation manager notified the State Historic Preservation Office and the Tribal Historic Preservation Office. The grave and the excavated dirt was covered with a tent and a tarp as forensic teams sifted through the remains and associated items. The second discovery in one year further underscored the need to understand the layers of this historic site.

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