Located south of Stones Prairie Church, Cemetery from 19th Century Suffers Major Damage by Loggers Cutting Down all Trees



Times Photo by Murray Bishoff

The Monett Times,a division of Cleveland Newspapers, Inc.
COPYRIGHT® 2003 All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with the emailed permission of Mr. Bishoff.


Logging decimates old cemetery

Murray Bishoff, Managing Editor

The Monett Times

Published March 12, 2003 4:00 PM CST


The small cemetery a half-mile south of St. John's Lutheran Church in Stones Prairie, on Farm Road 1055, has been upended by logging activity. Neighbor Robert Gates, pictured, shows how the largest cluster of grave markers have been scattered. The monument at his right was moved, base and all. The new stones at front right, placed to replace original markers from 1857 and 1890, had cut logs lying on them as if the stones supported the cutting.


Located south of Stones Prairie Church, cemetery from 19th century
suffers major damage by loggers cutting down all trees.


In the bi-county area, there are perhaps as many as 75 cemeteries, mostly small, many without names. Some are tucked away in backlots or farm fields. One such cemetery, though located next to a road, has been largely destroyed in recent weeks by the willful actions of persons doing logging.

The cemetery in question is located a half-mile south of St. John's Lutheran Church in Stones Prairie, about two-and-a-half miles west of Purdy, facing Farm Road 1055. Adjacent to property that had been owned by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Rupp, the parents of the late Esther Storck, wife of the late Herbert Storck, the small cemetery had around three dozen graves in it, many marked by field stones, many with markers that no longer have headstones bearing names, the visible markers carrying the family names of Medlin, Stephensen, and Stinnett.

Robert Gates, who lives about a mile to the east on property his father acquired in the late 1940s, this week discovered suspects have gone into the cemetery, cut down and removed a handful of large trees, then proceeded to cut down more than a dozen small trees that appear to have little value, and hardly seem worth the trouble to remove even for firewood.

The small cemetery was in a wooded and highly overgrown area. Most of the visible stones appear to date from the 1880s and 1890s. Gates said even his father had not recalled anyone having been buried there within memory. Seemingly protected in the cluster of underbrush, the cemetery proved especially vulnerable in this case, for unseen, the loggers dropped the small trees in a haphazard manner, breaking the old stones, overturning others, and taking one monument, base included, and displacing it from its gravesite.

"To me, this is desecration of a cemetery. I just want it stopped," Gates said. He figured the loggers, who knew precisely what they were doing as the cemetery was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, had been at it for around three weeks. One tree truck sliced in half vertically lay on a headstone that was apparently being used to support the work.

Gates had Barry County Sheriff's deputies out to the site, and has identified persons in the area whom he believes have been logging in the vicinity. Investigation into the situation is continuing. Gates is not sure if the scattered stones in the notably neglected graveyard can be restored to a semblance of what had been there before.