Moorhead's first cemetery, home to rich community history, turns 150

Yahoo

27-04-2025

Apr. 26—MOORHEAD — As Moorhead's Prairie Home Cemetery reaches another milestone, all is in order at the graveyard on one of the city's busiest streets.
While traffic whips by on Eighth Street, cemetery manager Mike Skavlem explains that hasn't always been the case for Moorhead's oldest cemetery, which turns 150 this year.
Skavlem has managed the cemetery for 38 years. When he started, it was overgrown with trees and bushes. Stones had been tipped over due to vandalism and decades of exposure to the elements.
"It was a bit of a disaster," Skavlem said.
Over the years, he worked to clean up the cemetery — cutting down trees, trimming bushes and propping up stones. While the graveyard was once considered full, the cleanup found more space for graves. It is still active today.
The cemetery is wedged between Concordia College and a residential neighborhood, but when it was founded in 1875, "Prairie Home" was a fitting name for the cemetery just outside of the growing pioneer town.
When the cemetery was founded in 1875, Moorhead had around 1,000 residents. In the 1870s, Moorhead was a rowdy tent city, according to Trista Raezer-Stursa, university archivist at Minnesota State University Moorhead. The town was growing due to the railroad passing through Fargo-Moorhead.
Across the Red River, the Dakota Territory, which included all of North Dakota and South Dakota, was a dry territory, so people would cross the river by ferry to drink in Moorhead.
"Moorhead just had that kind of reputation for a while. ... They just had all these saloons where people would go to drink and such," Raezer-Stursa said.
The need for a cemetery in the boisterous, growing town was made evident when the brother of a local Presbyterian minister died while visiting Moorhead in 1874. The Rev. Oscar Elmer helped start the cemetery after his brother drowned in the Red River during a visit from the East Coast. Elmer was unable to send his brother's body back, and since Moorhead had no cemetery at the time, he was buried in a temporary grave marked by a rope between two trees.
In April of the next year, Elmer convened a group with six other prominent residents to establish Prairie Home Cemetery. Founders included attorney and politician Solomon Comstock and doctor
John Kurtz.
The group signed the articles of incorporation for the cemetery on April 27, 1875.
While the cemetery is in the middle of Moorhead now, when it was established, it would have been outside of town, Raezer-Stursa said. Then, the town was confined to the areas around First Avenue, Center Avenue and Main Avenue. The first neighborhood was where the Hjemkomst Center and Viking Ship Park are today.
The cemetery's first burial was in May 1875, of 24-year-old Bernard Berg, who died of typhoid fever. The body of Elmer's brother was transferred to the cemetery in June 1875.
The cemetery first sold out of plots in 1882, necessitating a new cemetery in Moorhead. Riverside Cemetery, then north of Moorhead, was established in 1884. The Riverside and Prairie Home Cemetery Associations eventually merged.
Over the years, some of Moorhead's most prominent and influential residents were buried at Prairie Home Cemetery, according to Petra Gunderson-Leith, archivist at the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County.
"It's like the who's who of Moorhead history," Gunderson-Leith said.
One of the earliest settlers in the area,
Randolph Probstfield,
is buried in Prairie Home Cemetery with his family. The farmer, and later politician, had a cabin and farm in what would become Oakport Township.
Other notable grave markers include those of suffragette Mae Burhnam, policewoman
Anna Gates
and the
Darrow family,
who were physicians and women's suffrage activists. The cemetery is also the final resting place of
Dr. Thrond Egge,
a physician who was murdered in 1909, and O.E. Flaten, a photographer who documented the early days and families of Moorhead.
The founders of Moorhead's Rourke Art Gallery + Museum, brothers James O'Rourke and Orland J. Rourke, are also buried in the cemetery.
Along with the well-known residents of Moorhead, the cemetery also has the graves of the unknown. Somewhere on the grounds is a potter's field, where people who could not afford a burial were buried, Gunderson-Leith said. Costs to bury people in that section were usually paid for by the county or through donations.
"So, a lot of the less well-to-do members of the community were buried in that section," Gunderson-Leith said.
Prairie Home Cemetery is perhaps best known for
inspiring the name
of a popular and long-running public radio variety show.
Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" got its name from the cemetery. The show aired from 1974 to 2016 and featured live music, comedy sketches and a weekly report from the fictitious Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon.
Keillor stumbled upon the name when he was in the Fargo-Moorhead area for a reading. The morning after a post-reading party, he went for a walk in Moorhead and saw the sign for Prairie Home Cemetery, he told The Forum in 2004. The name stuck with him.
"When you tell stories about the Minnesota of your childhood, you are tending a sort of cemetery, and so the name seemed appropriate," Keillor said.
While the biggest visual changes to the cemetery happened long ago, Skavlem's work never ends as he does the day-to-day maintenance of cutting the grass, trimming trees and making repairs to the aging cemetery.
"We used to have a sign over there a long time ago, that said 'restoration project underway' or whatever," Skavlem said, beckoning to the entrance of the cemetery. "And one day, I took it down, because every time we come here, it's a restoration project."
Figuring out the locations of graves and where people have purchased plots before their deaths can be challenging, Skavlem said. Over the years, things have been added and were not documented or mapped very well.
"It is a pretty rich history, but it is kind of lost to time, as well," Skavlem said.
He did not know how long the cemetery will remain active.
"That's hard to say with Prairie Home," Skavlem said. "It's taken a long time to get here, so it could be another 30 years to full, I suppose."