By Sara StrongA small, pioneer cemetery on the northwest side of Luverne made history … and continues to interest local historians.At Monday’s Rock County Historical Society meeting, Vance Walgrave told the story of relocating the lonely old graveyard to Maplewood Cemetery.The task marked the first time the state of Minnesota declared dead bodies wards of the state so they could be moved without family members’ permission. The moving project that started back in 1904 was finally finished by Walgrave in 1997.Walgrave, who was working as superintendent at Maplewood at the time, said, "At first when I started asking questions, we were told there was nothing we could do."He was assigned caretaking duties for both cemeteries, even though the old one was north of the American Reformed Church and Maplewood is a distance away, on West Warren Street. The old cemetery became Maplewood’s responsibility in 1949.The cemetery association actually started procedures to move the cemetery in 1904. But so many of the dead were travelers or pioneers with no surviving family members and the process just didn’t get completed.Luverne founder Philo Hawes was an early advocate of moving the cemetery. His daughter (Luverne’s namesake) Eva LuVerne, died of tuberculosis in her ‘20s. She was moved to Maplewood with her husband, who also died young. Philo is buried in Maplewood, too, but Walgrave thought it was ironic that the man who wanted all the remains moved, had three bodies in his family plot that had to be moved in 1997.Six feet under"Exactly 100 years after the last burial, we got permission to move them out," Walgrave said.Local attorney Ben Vander Kooi and then lobbyist Andy Steensma were big players in the move. Local legislators sponsored bills to give special permission for moving the bodies. Walgrave had to testify before both House and Senate committees, who he said were uneasy about the process, since it hadn’t been done before."No one ever [legally] moved a body without permission from family members," he said.The cemetery board had to have a hearing, and publish legal notices in case any surviving family members objected to a move. "We didn’t hear anything in three weeks of publications, so we could do it," he said.Walgrave knew the cemetery was used for only about 20 years. "I thought it’d be a piece of cake," he said of the research portion of the reinternment. He spent hundreds of hours on research.Some bodies had already been moved by earlier families, and with the lack of care over the years, finding grave sites took detective work. He used metal detectors to find stakes marking lot lines. Then, by scraping a layer of grass and dirt with a grader, clear signs of disturbed dirt were revealed. Walgrave and his crew used a back hoe to dig a few feet deeper and then hand dug the remains.Walgrave was concerned about diseases like smallpox that could still be active in the graves. He couldn’t find any research on the topic, even after contacting many state agencies."They didn’t know if the disease would be viable after that long," he said.Bodies were buried anywhere from 2 and 1/2 feet to 7 feet deep. Many times the wooden caskets rotted, leaving skeletal remains in piles in the dirt. Walgrave had to put skeletal remains in bags to be transferred to Maplewood.He said that throughout the entire process, he kept respect for the dead and their descendents a priority."I didn’t let it bother me; I just thought of it as an archeological expedition," he said. "Some people wonder if it was morbid, but it wasn’t."He measured and recorded all the facts about each site, and was able to pair people to known names of the buried in some cases when other identification wasn’t provided.At the time the cemetery was used, the newly settled county didn’t keep death records, and early papers didn’t print obituaries for everyone. So there are still some that can’t be identified.In all, Walgrave dug up 149 graves, finding remains of 89 1/2 people. He’s still mystified that the upper half of one man’s body was missing. That same body faced west while others were buried facing east, to greet "the rising sun."The number of remains was a surprise to Walgrave, who was told to expect to move between 16 and 35 bodies.He took notice of each of the remains — who probably chewed tobacco, judging by stained teeth; who was young; who was old; who was buried together as husband and wife. Walgrave noted that only one had a filling in his teeth, probably a traveling salesman since it was a gold filling. One woman had a cloth over her hair, like a nightcap. "We didn’t find eyeglasses, rings, jewelry. Either they didn’t have them, or didn’t think they wanted to be buried with them."Walgrave said grave robbers of the day may have created a norm where people didn’t bury valuables.Walgrave refers to one man with size 11 shoes as "cowboy" because he stood out as one of the few buried with footwear.Anything found with the bodies was buried again with them when they were transferred to Maplewood. Sometimes, all that was left were coffin handles among the bones. One grave had a whiskey bottle, either belonging to the dead or left by a grave digger. Walgrave said, "I felt like it belonged to him, so I put it with him again."In order to share the history and the newer story of the cemetery, Walgrave donated his scrapbook to the Rock County Historical Society Monday. He also donated the top of an infant’s coffin to display in the museum."This turned out to be a much bigger project than we thought, but I feel like it was my mission to do this," Walgrave said. Old Herald article tells of longtime concern for the buried Walgrave said, "If you jump back to 1867, when the railroad was about to be chugging along and the Homestead Act was in place, things were just booming."Walgrave said the population of the county reached almost 4,000 very quickly by about 1880, and not all of the residents were here to set up roots. People who traveled through died during harsh winters, or of diseases like diphtheria, typhoid fever or scarlet fever. They got proper burials, but their headstones wore and family members weren’t around to give the sites care.Even in the early 1900s, local concern grew for the unkempt cemetery.A headline in the Aug. 9, 1907 issue of the Rock County Herald read, "TIME FOR ACTION, Where are the relatives?"The article continues, "Considerable complaint is being made over the condition of Luverne cemetery, not only among those who have dead buried therein, but among the people in general who have taken any notice of this old ‘resting place’ of Luverne people who have gone before. In addition to the fact that thus far this summer the cemetery has been given no more attention than a vacant lot in a decadent village, it is charged that for a while the cemetery was used as a pasture for cattle, but whether by someone willfully pasturing their cattle therein or by the animals getting in though defective fences the Herald does not know. Evidence, however, that cattle were there is found in the damage done to tombstones, lot fences, etc.The fault for this condition of affairs is due in large measure, at least, to the negligence of the officers of the association, for while the cemetery fell into disuse far as new interments are concerned fully ten years ago. … The deplorable condition of affairs should not be tolerated. It is inexcusable. … It will be remembered that about a year ago a movement was started to have the dead buried in the Luverne cemetery removed to Maplewood and the Luverne cemetery vacated and the land sold to defray the expense of such removal."Finally, in 1997, the cemetery was sold to American Reformed Church and Maplewood was expanded, giving 89 former Rock County residents permanent rest in well-tended grounds. Nine are labeled with "unknown" grave markers.