Not difficult to locate, away from the older business sections of town, down country roads, hidden behind hilltops, obscured in tall grass in a lonely field are the burial grounds of Portage County. Within its political boundaries there are in excess of seventy-five burial grounds dating from white settlement. Unascertainable is the number of Indian burial sites and other often unidentifiable burial grounds.

Forest Cemetery and Guardian Angel Cemetery, each located in Stevens Point, are among the more sizable in the county, each with several thousand interments. Smaller burial grounds are the more numerous and are located throughout the villages and countryside as are a number of family and individual plots. Stevens Point Union, Plover Village, Linwood Union, Linwood Town, and Maine Cemeteries are all more sizable than the Brown-Cate family cemetery on the corner of County Highway HH and Burbank Road in the Town of Stockton. Near the spillway on West River Drive in the Town of Linwood is the grave of Isaac Ferris, river pilot, one of the more widely known individual plots in the area.

On occasion an area is no longer discernible as having been a burial ground. Such is the case with what was probably the first graveyard in Stevens Point, located in the middle of what is now Main Street between the present 1036 and 1059 addresses. As the young community expanded eastward this land became too valuable to be used merely as a graveyard, it became necessary to remove it; this was done but the precise location of the re-interred bodies is not certain, though it is believed most are in Union Cemetery and the remaining ones in Forest Cemetery. City and village burial grounds were rarely regarded, a century plus ago, as places where one’s bones might lie in eternal rest. Settlements matured, real estate increased in value, thus settlement maturation brought graveyard obliteration, or if providential grave removal to a more “permanent” home.

Another example of an unidentifiable burial plot is the case of James Hall, whose body was discovered by a Mr. Wilson on an early June Sunday in 1856 lying in shallow Wisconsin River water between Yellow Banks and Mill Creek. Hall had been running lumber for Walter McIndoe of Big Bull Falls and had drowned earlier in the spring in the rapids above Yellow Banks. These banks, near where he was found, became his final resting-place. It may be assumed that such was a rather frequent occurrence during early settlement days. These burial places are hidden from us until a manifestation of progress shall unearth these long forgotten tombs. Though then as now organized graveyards were predominate with Stevens Point having a Cemetery Association as early as 1853, possibly earlier.

Prior to the nineteenth century standard burial places had been among the living, in mid-town, in churchyards, or in churches, a practice dating back to eighth century England. New England town commons were frequently employed as graveyards and from comments and symbolism extant appear to have been treated simply as unattractive necessities to be avoided as much as possible by the living. Abatement of this attitude began in the early to mid nineteenth century.

This sentiment change brought about what came to be known as the “rural” cemetery movement; where one’ s loved lost could lie in undisturbed tranquility; but should more accurately be termed the “garden” cemetery movement. Generic terms “graveyard” and “burial” ground were now replaced by “cemetery”. The primary objective of this revolutionary development was to provide a place to inter the deceased without offending the sentiments or threatening the health of the living.

Purely aesthetic considerations was a secondary objective. The necropolis could serve a variety of functions unconnected with death and burial. The cemetery creation would form a composition visually exciting and not to be found elsewhere. Ingredients of this composition are few and simple: stone, iron, and natural growths coming together to form a discernible pattern in which duplication is never identical.

Early American grave markers were often or fieldstone, wood, or slate. Wisconsin’s early tombstones often were sandstone, occasionally limestone, with finely incised italic inscriptions meant to “imitate” handwriting. Fieldstone was a commonly used marker material prior to a community’s having a proficient stone craftsman available, which Stevens Point had as early as 1856;whether he did gravestones though is uncertain. One fieldstone grave marker is the H. S. B. memorial in McDill Cemetery, east of Whiting on County Highway HH.

Formal family plots, usually utilizing marble monuments, began to appear in the mid-nineteenth century suggesting that the social attitudes of the living community were changing whereas population was increasing beyond the point where the deceased, formerly interred at random, had a reasonable hope of lying among friends. The heyday of marble markers lasted until the third decade of this century when uniform granite blocks became the norm. Today bronze markers are beginning to dominate, particularly in the increasingly popular “lawn” cemeteries where smoothness is barely broken by rows of shallow depressions.

A nearly universal characteristic of mid last century family plots was the utilization of ornamental ironwork to delineate them. This was often some of the finest local ironwork available, some still in existence despite years of neglect. Before long there was a negative reaction to the plethora of railings within cemeteries, causing the grounds, many felt, to be unaesthetic. In actuality the fencing was impractical and merely symbolic of the American trait of individual possessiveness. There is something unnatural about the private property concept being carried into the realm of the dead where no one has more than a tenuous hold on what he covers or what covers him.

The reaction against unnecessary iron work for plot delineation gave way to the use of curbstones, which in turn were superseded by initialed lot corner markers or no visible marking at all. The ban on obvious internal cemetery markings allowed the development a more natural environment.

Flora is essential to the composition of any cemetery but there is little virtue in treating them as gardens. A particularly appropriate graveyard plant is ivy, traditionally associated with mourning. Few things are as pleasurable to the eye as an ivy-covered wall or fence. Other pertinent plants are wildflowers, shrubs, and trees which should be viewed objectively as necessary components for a pleasing visualization. The juxtaposition of widely varied surfaces and materials, the possibility of visual surprise, are the qualities of burial grounds.

Conversion of the cemetery from a shunned area to one of succor, enchantment, and instruction is accomplished through the combination of the beauty and plenty of nature with art. Nature’s world within the cemetery preaches the lessons of natural theology, that the creation and destruction is continuous. Cemeteries, the realm of quietude, melody, and beauty should give one a sense of “deep peace” beyond the hopes and cares, grief and strife of the world.

The cemetery is a quiet peaceful place that is not just a parcel of land where the dead are buried, it is a place where one can achieve a deep sense of profound eternal quiescence and spiritual exaltation. It represents a posture of stability in an otherwise rapidly changing world, it represents continuity, a sensitive record of successive generations each with their own set of values, it represents open space and beauty which should relate positively to the surrounding landscape.

On a warm summer eve, or in a gentle spring rain, or on a crisp autumn morn when the colors are radiant, or during a winter’s gentle snowfall a cemetery achieves a quality singularly its own. How can death be feared here?