Friends (Quaker) Mission Cemetery (Lost)
Lost Cemetery
SW quarter of Section 7, Township 12S, Range 25E
The exact location of this lost cemetery is unknown but according to a drawning by someone who grew up in the Mission, it was located close by on the southeast side of the building. A DAR monument marks the vicinity of the Mission on 61st St. just east of Hemlock and the land is largely undeveloped. The Quaker Mission is marked on the 1874 Johnson County Atlas, but the cemetery is not marked.
The cemetery is mentioned several times in Flora Harvey Kittle's timeline and is described as adjoining the Meeting House. The cemetery was first started in 1840 while Henry Harvey was in charge of the Mission as the result of a cholera epidemic. "Several of their oldest Chiefs died and were laid to rest there." In 1847, Jesse Harvey, was in charge of the Mission. "In May, the superintendent, after a few days illness died, and his grave is seen today where he was laid beside the graves of those Indian chiefs who were victis of cholera." Then, in 1864, "Smallpox broke out among the children that fall, and two new graves were added in the little burial ground southwest of the house." In closure, Ms. Kittle mentions the cemetery once again. "The graveyard, we are informed, is to be preserved by Kansas Yearly Meeting of Friends." 1
The Friends Mission school was mentioned in the 1854 Treaty with the Shawnee, however there was no mention of the cemetery. "...to the Friends' Shawnee labor-school, including the improvements there, three hundred and twenty acres of land." 2
In a late 1900s newspaper, an article mentions finding a few broken gravemarkers laying up against a tree. The peices found eventually were placed in a concrete block at Shawnee Indian Cemetery.
1874 Shawnee Township, Johnson Co Atlas
1 Flora Harvey Kittle and Anna Steward Pearson, Shawnee Indians in Kansas, (Kansas City, KS, 1917), 12, 14-15, 21.
2 Kappler, Charles J. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Vol. 2, Treaties, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 619.
