On the Mark: Ode to small town cemeteries

This morning, we had a visitor. Aaron Aho, the son of the recently deceased Wright resident Marvin Aho, came by to speak with husband Rod Walli about the burial site and interment for Marvin’s father in the Lakeside Cemetery south of Wright. Rod, along with several others from Finnish immigrant families who settled and stayed in Wright, Minnesota, continues to serve on a committee overseeing the cemetery’s care and maintenance and observing rules for purchasing plots, and also locating and interring deceased community members.

I listened curiously to their conversations. There are rules and procedures to be followed. And sometimes, disputes about who owns or doesn’t own particular plots. A few interments have occurred in the wrong place, which can make it all quite confusing. Fortunately, in this case, the burial plot could be accurately identified.

I found it revealing how the care and additions to the cemetery are managed. A committee comprised of Sulo Walli, Shirley Walli, and Melinda Ferry along with sextants Tad Walli and Rod Walli are informal managers of the cemetery. From time to time there are cemetery meetings. In 2019, more than a hundred people showed up, some from out of state, to celebrate 100 years of the Lakeside Cemetery.

In 2002, Margaret Webster published a beautifully illustrated book about the cemetery, covering its history. It was rich with photos and stories of the ancestors and characters that inhabit it.

Inside the front cover, she wrote: “To Rodney, lots of memories to have a laugh and maybe meditate a bit.”

Cemeteries in smaller towns like ours portray community history and structure, including marriages and deaths, some untimely. It isn’t always like this when you grow up in a big metropolitan area, as I did in the Twin Cities. To begin with, my parents were born and raised in smaller Minnesota cities and communities: my father, David Markusen, in Cromwell, and my mother Jeanne Roell, in Faribault. As a child, I often visited my mother’s hometown where her large Irish-American family members — all Dillons from Ireland and Roells from Germany — were laid to rest. In Cromwell, where my grandfather Marinus was still living, there wasn’t a grave site for his wife, Ruth Lee Markusen.

Eventually, my cousins RuthAnn, Martha, Jana and David and I buried grampa’s ashes in Stillwater, in a site belonging to the extended Ruth Wilson Lee family where his wife Ruth was also interred. My father’s remains, which had been deeded to the University of Minnesota before his death, were never returned to my mother. I negotiated with the cemetery manager to permit a stone that names Ruth’s husband, Marinus, and sons, David and Sidney, despite not having ashes for all.

Years later, my mother invited me to go cemetery shopping with her. We visited all the cemeteries in the Twin Cities and and in her home town of Faribault, where her family members are interred. Sunset on the Twin Cities’ northeast side, where her father Joseph Roell is buried with his second wife. His first wife, my mom’s mother, Margaret, is buried in Faribault, having sustained massive burns from putting out an appliance fire with her body.

Eventually, our mother settled on a beautiful pond-side site in Minneapolis, Lakewood Cemetery, where we’d lived nearby for long stretches of our lives. Lakewood permitted her to put both my father David’s and her name, Jeanne, on the gravestone. When both my brother and I were living nearby, we often stopped there to visit.

It‘s so different living in a community where everyone knows where their ancestors lie, often among community members.

I’ve gone walking with Rod several times through the Wright cemetery, absorbed in his stories about personalities, relationships, and good and bad fortunes. Of course, although there are several Cromwell-Wright area cemeteries, often initiated by churches and/or family dynasties and neighborhoods, where the deceased enjoy familiar and sometimes strange grave fellows.

Just another reason to love living the smaller town life!

Columnist Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. One of the five owners of the Pine Knot News, she lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell with her husband, Rod Walli.