“A cemetery, the home of the dead, is ever an interesting spot to the living. Here ends the labor of those who lived before. Their names and epitaphs bring recollections of the past to mind.”
So says an unattributed quotation found on a scrap of paper in the Eden Prairie Historical Society resource files. It’s a perfect way to embark on the story of Eden Prairie cemeteries; perhaps more meaningful because of its anonymity.

People have lived in Minnesota for at least 12,000 years. Some evidence of those lives can be verified by the earthen burial mounds preserved along Eden Prairie’s Minnesota River bluff. In the 1880s, the burial mounds had already sparked the curiosity of relic hunters and antiquarians. In an early attempt to record sites before their destruction, Theodore H. Lewis carefully mapped more than a hundred earthworks in Eden Prairie. Since then, leading archaeologists and historians have continued to investigate. As one archaeologist said during a late 20th century Eden Prairie dig, “It’s kind of exciting. We might be chasing the history of settlements that existed 5,000 years before the pyramids were built!” From prehistory to the present, Eden Prairie’s graves and cemeteries silently preserve the stories of settlement and survival, ethnic and religious heritage and family connections.

In 18th and 19th century America, church graveyards were the most common burial places. Three factors helped alter that practice: there were no churches when the first pioneers pushed west; the development of the Rural Cemetery Movement; and the Victorian perspective on death and funerals.

Eden Prairie is a textbook example of the shift. As they arrived in the mid-19th century, Eden Prairie pioneers went to work clearing land to build homes and farm buildings. Next came schools, then churches and finally cemeteries. Consequently, because these earliest settlers had no churches or graveyards, their deceased were laid to rest in some beautiful place on the farmstead, the graves marked with a wooden cross, pile of stones or a simple wooden fence. Many of these pioneer graves still exist but most are lost and long forgotten. What we do know about Eden Prairie settlers’ earliest burials has been found in contemporaneous journals and diaries.
In response to overcrowded church graveyards and the isolation of old family burying grounds, the new, modern Rural Cemetery Movement was taking hold across the county. Traditional funerary practices came to be viewed as unsanitary and old-fashioned. Progressive-minded Americans moved toward carefully regulated park-like cemeteries designed in accordance with American Victorian notions of aesthetics, propriety and society. The flowering of these new social mandates and the growth of Eden Prairie coincided perfectly. So it was not surprising that Pleasant Hill Cemetery and Eden Prairie Cemetery were systematically laid out and logically organized. The new fashion stipulated that the graves be set in parallel rows with ample space set aside for carriage driveways and pedestrian walkways, all embellished with picturesque “natural” features and romantic landscape ornaments. In many ways, the rural cemetery looked and functioned as a community park.

Eden Prairie Cemetery (8810 Eden Prairie Road, 1/3 mile north of Pioneer Trail) was platted in 1864. The beautiful, four-acre wooded hillside was purchased from Alexander Gould. The grounds were laid out in a rectangular grid of 16 by 18 foot lots, each lot with space for eight graves. Lot owners would be encouraged to decorate their plots with grave plantings, furniture, ornaments, curbing and fencing, the focal point of which would be the gravestone or monument. Ample space was set aside for driveways and walkways to accommodate outdoor socializing, even picnicking. A 1906 plan shows eight east-west alleys, called “avenues,” named North, Maple, Plum and Grove, Main, Prairie, Pine, Oak and South, intersected at right angles by 17 numbered “avenues.”

Pleasant Hill Cemetery (located on the north side of Pioneer Trail, just west of Pax Christi Catholic Community) was sited on a natural terrace with an unobstructed view overlooking farmland and the Purgatory Creek valley. In 1885, its two acres of land, purchased from Jacob Wolf, were laid out in a grid containing 96 lots and numerous avenues. Pleasant Hill was located behind the old Presbyterian Church (built in 1869, demolished in 1966) and some old records erroneously refer to it as the “Presbyterian cemetery.” The two organizations, however, were always independent of each other.
Pleasant Hill and Eden Prairie Cemetery were almost identical in terms of association set-up and community park attributes and, as time progressed, were faced with the same problems of under-capitalization. Each was organized as a private, non-denominational, nonprofit association with lot owners acting as stockholders in the enterprise. As the individual lots were private landholdings, lot owners were responsible for beautification and maintenance. Eden Prairie citizens, just like their urban counterparts, readily adopted the elaborate rituals and funerary customs associated with the Victorian era. Families grieved publically and wore clothing and jewelry that distinguished them as mourners. And, while funerals were solemn occasions, they were a communal affairs. As everyone knew everyone ... and most were related, cemetery events (not limited to burials) were opportunities for rural socializing. Well-run, well-used and beautifully appointed cemeteries were tangible evidence of a community’s stability and status.

But time and circumstances change. Eden Prairie Cemetery’s association board minutes set the stage:

* In 1898 a lot (eight graves) cost $5
* In 1923, the cemetery board voted an increase to $20/lot
* In 1934, it was “moved that lot owners get together on May 21 to clean cemetery and that the ladies give a good dinner. Hereafter all lots sold will be $75.”

Costs were going up, families were moving away or dying out so upkeep suffered and there were fewer volunteers to work. In the late 1920s, the cemetery boards established perpetual care trust funds and took over maintenance of their grounds. If you visit today, you will notice that each cemetery has an old section and a new section; you can see the difference between the Rural Cemetery style and the newer Lawn Cemetery methodology. With the new management approach, the new sections’ grounds were laid out to maximize efficiency with flush-to-the-ground grave markers and no grave plantings allowed. And what remained of the picturesque roughness and individually of the old sections was being smoothed out, eliminating foliage and furnishings around lots. In an “Eden Prairie Heritage Preservation Site Nomination” document, Robert Vogel writes, “As mortality rates declined the culture of death and funerals became increasingly privatized, sanitized and professionalized. The cemeteries that Victorians had regarded as a culturally and morally uplifting social space now came to be defined as a repository of the dead.”

We are still living history. In 1987, upon the request of the Pleasant Hill Cemetery association, the cemetery’s administration was handed over to the city of Eden Prairie. Pleasant Hill is now a city-owned and managed cemetery with a perpetual care fund that is tapped to pay for administration, operation and maintenance. But Eden Prairie Cemetery is still a private, nonprofit corporation, operated by its owners. The current cemetery administrator is Mike Rogers. Mike took over from his dad, Bert, who took over from his brother, Harry. Bert was chairman of the board until the day he died in 2003. Thankfully, community, family and continuity live on.

Both cemeteries, by the way, remain in active use and there are still lots for sale. And, most certainly, both cemeteries still have tales to tell. Gravestones and cemetery association records have aesthetic, sentimental and commemorative value as well as being a permanent source of historical and genealogical information. When’s the last time you walked back in time by visiting an Eden Prairie cemetery?

Betsy Adams is an Eden Prairie resident, student of Eden Prairie history and chair of the city’s Heritage Preservation Commission. In honor of Eden Prairie’s 150th birthday this year, Adams is writing monthly columns on the city’s history in the Eden Prairie News.