Cemetery provides details of American frontier life, death

Horse Prairie Cemetery is a lovely place, "sitting on a modest hill surrounded by farmland," says political science professor Ronald Stockton.

This stone located in a cemetery in southern Illinois marks the grave of an infant member of Professor Ronald Stockton's extended family. Although not from the Horse Prairie Cemetery Stockton studied in Sesser, Ill., the marker reflects the prevalence of child deaths that he noted in his research. (Photo by Ronald Stockton)

"When I was a boy in the 1950s, we made regular treks to this place to put flowers on these graves," Stockton says. "It's far more beautiful now than it was back then, splendid in its elegance and pastoral simplicity."

But a study of the cemetery's stones and what they reveal about this more than 150-year-old community indicate that death was a constant, if unwelcome, companion for the first settlers of the town, Stockton says.

"Reconstructing those days is not easy, but a walk through an early cemetery reveals a time of struggle and tragedy, and of dreams unfulfilled," he says.

Stockton's parents are buried in the Horse Prairie Cemetery, along with his grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, aunts and a host of other relatives. The cemetery is in Sesser, a small town at the southern tip of Illinois.

In 2001, Stockton had just begun to inventory the graves in the cemetery when he learned of similar work done on the same site by Clara Crocker Brown, a lifelong resident of the town.

"Clara Crocker Brown used her passion and knowledge of family linkages to locate genealogical information on many of the persons buried in Horse Prairie," Stockton says. "These details give a richness of inestimable value to contemporary genealogists and to future generations."

Stockton and Brown agreed that he would publish a book based on her inventory, augmented by supplementary material Stockton had gathered on tombstone poems and memorial inscriptions.

In addition, Stockton used the demographic data in the inventory to analyze mortality patterns in the community and produced an article, "Death on the Frontier," which was published in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society in 2003.

Both the inventory and the article have been published in a book Stockton and Brown have made available to local genealogical societies and libraries.

Of the 829 graves in the cemetery, Stockton analyzed for his study of mortality patterns the 683 that have both birth and death dates. While there is no information on the cause of death in those cases, "the pattern of burial itself gives insight into the nature of life and death in an earlier time," Stockton says.

For most of the 19th century and into the early 20th century, Horse Prairie was the major and most popular cemetery in the township. Its graves drew from the general population and most likely represented the overall pattern of burial in the community. Stockton augments his study with census data and health statistics from the federal decennial "Mortality Enumeration."

But the graves themselves reveal the high rate of death among the very young, shocking to modern sensibilities. In the 19th century, the overall percentage of burials in Horse Prairie involving children under 10 years old was just below 50 percent. There was no decade in the century when the proportion fell below 45 percent.

This pattern reflects the realities of life on the American frontier during the 19th century, Stockton notes, the period when most of the bodies were interred at Horse Prairie.

"While we know that death is an inevitable part of life, we also know that death is often a social phenomenon, the product of conditions and circumstances that can change over time," he says. "The conditions of poverty, bad sanitation, poor health and disease bear particularly hard on the young. It was a dangerous time to raise children."