Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery

Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery is the oldest graveyard in the city, established in 1851.

It is also walking distance from my house, so i thought i would go over and check it out the past Sunday morning, while it was still cool out. Here are some images from that excursion:

 Meet me at the cemetery gates...

 This is the grave of Philander Prescott, an early settler who married a Dakota woman. Despite this, he died fighting against them in the Dakota War of 1862.

 Cute stone caretaker's cottage. I would totally take care of the cemetery in exchange for living here, but the groundskeeper seems to be a contract worker and this is now just a glorified storage shed.

 Beautiful flowers alongside the cottage.

 Some of the graves in here had these wrought-iron crucifix markers instead of stones.

 Another iron marker. None of these had legible names on them so maybe they aren't even grave markers, i dunno.

The inscription on this stone dedicated it to "Pioneer mothers."

It's a nice cemetery, but I generally prefer ones with more trees, shrubbery, and perennials around the stones. This one had a few trees but not many, and it seems like planting perennials at the gravesites of loved ones is not a thing folks have done much of here. The whole thing is fenced and gated and locked up, which I get it in a metropolitan area, i guess, but i'm used to the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, no gates and everybody walks the paths through it just in the course of traveling to/from class on the UNC campus.

I might make it a goal to visit some more Minneapolis cemeteries though, and see whether others are more wooded or floral. It's a nice free thing to do.