Off the Beaten Trail.....

I will shock you today with a drastic turn from  my normal subject matter. I drive past an old cemetery  each time when I drive to the old place. I have thought in my mind, almost every time that I passed it, that I should just stop. Yesterday was the day to just turn the car left on the intersection and drive right up to the edge of it. The orange plastic flower is a mystery making me wonder if it is a great great grandparent of someone in the area. I also saw boot footprints coming from the road that could be tracked into the cemetery after the snowfall of the day before and. I wondered what the reason for their walking through there.

I would probably think it to be an early pioneer cemetery as there is no town near it. The road would have followed the Des Moines river valley south to north. The mile long bridge of Lake Saylorvilled ends at the base of the hill that it sits. There isn't a sign to tell me the name of the cemetery but it sets on NW Beaver and 100th street.  Granger is about seven miles west of here and Polk City sits across the lake on the other end of the bridge.  As a cemetery, the Polk City p people would have had to drive down into a deep valley and back up again to get to the place.

I stopped for a couple of minutes just to grab a couple of shots.  The cemetery has markers of the late 1800s on the southwest corner of it and the rest of the cemetery is still in use.  I witnessed three different times when funerals were being held as I passed by in my struck.

A janitor friend of mine, a few years back, said he was going to be buried there.  I had seen the family stones as I drive past the place to drive down to the lake shore under the bridge. The road to the lake follows the edge of the place. Out in the middle of the old stones sits a newer one that seemed to have been set there to join an older generation of family. It was placed there apparently in 1962. My step grandfather in southern Iowa was a Brooks but I don't know the family history. I will return to this place again. There is another very old cemetery on the same road closer to Ankeny. They too had a funeral there a month ago even thought it was such an old  one and it looks completely full of graves.

This photo, when enlarged, shows that my car is whiter than snow. I now can see that the husband was buried there in 1938 and when his wife died in 1962 that the family put a modern granite stone on graves.