Greenwood Cemetery is a historic cemetery on West Main Street in Council Grove, Kansas. The cemetery opened in 1862; before then, all burials in Council Grove took place at the

Kaw Mission Kaw Mission is a historic church mission at 500 N. Mission Street in Council Grove, Kansas that was home, school and church to 30 Kaw boys from 1851–1854. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. With . The site is now ...

's graveyard. A number of bodies were moved from the graveyard to the new cemetery once it opened. The local chapter of the

Independent Order of Odd Fellows The Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) is a non-political and non-sectarian international fraternal order of Odd Fellowship. It was founded in 1819 by Thomas Wildey in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Evolving from the Order of Odd ...

began managing the cemetery in 1870; the group

plat In the United States, a plat ( or ) (plan) is a cadastral map, drawn to scale, showing the divisions of a piece of land. United States General Land Office surveyors drafted township plats of Public Lands Surveys to show the distance and bear ...

ted the cemetery grounds and built a stone wall around it, the south side of which still stands. The Council Grove city government took over cemetery operations in 1911 and built the Shelter House, the cemetery's only building, in 1922. The city expanded the cemetery grounds in 1923 and 1945; in 1990, when all available plots had been sold, they opened a new cemetery. Most of Council Grove's early settlers and civic leaders are buried at Greenwood Cemetery, including

Seth M. Hays Seth Millington Hays (April 23, 1811 – February 3, 1873) was the first white settler and a civic leader in Council Grove, Kansas. Life Hays was born in Callaway County, Missouri, and moved to Kansas in 1847 to open a trading post on the Santa ...

, the city's first white settler. The cemetery was added to the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

on February 3, 2020.

References

External links

* National Register of Historic Places in Morris County, Kansas Cemeteries on the National Register of Historic Places in Kansas Cemeteries established in the 1860s {{US-cemetery-stub