Checking out the cemetery in the middle of campus
Located just north of Mountain View and Valley View apartments, on the east side of campus, surrounded by a tall, iron fence is the Logan City Cemetery. With 17,600 burials and 41,324 plots, the cemetery has seen Logan from its beginnings as a single log home to the college town it is today. Along with its front-row view of the town’s history, the cemetery is steeped in its own legend, mystery and intrigue.
The cemetery didn’t always reside in its current location. The exact address of the old cemetery is still unknown, as documentation has been lost, but it is believed that in 1860 it lay between 500 and 600 North, and 600 and 700 East, according to documents provided by Seth Sparks, current sexton for the cemetery.
According to Marcia J. Sorenson, who wrote “The Old Logan Graveyard,” the first resident of Logan’s old graveyard was Charlotte Eynon, wife of John R. Blanchard, who built the first log cabin in the city in 1859 and founded the graveyard. The old graveyard, according to Sorenson, was used for about six years, in which anywhere from 52 to 70 people were buried with Eynon. Plans were then made to move the cemetery.
Sorenson quoted William Hugie, a resident during the moving of the cemetery, who said in 1966 that the reason for the move was because of water drainage.
Hugie said, “The area was wet in the spring months and the soil, being muddy, the head boards rotted off in a short time, many of which were not replaced and thus exact burial spots became lost.”
Because of the lost grave sites, bodies were still being found as late as the 1960s. Sorenson related the experience of Dr. Ezra W. Cragun, who said that, while digging for sewer and water lines for his house, two bodies were uncovered.
Aside from the missing bodies, 42 bodies were exhumed and couldn’t be identified. In 1882, the sexton of the cemetery petitioned the city for the removal of the bodies at the price of $5 for adults and $4 for children, which included furnished boxes for those whose coffins had disintegrated.
Sorenson, again, quoted Hugie, saying he could remember that when he was 8 years old, he saw the bodies being brought out of the ground. He described the sight of the “bleached bones” and “long hair of the women” as one that “haunted” him for years.
The nameless bodies were put in one plot, now known as Pioneer Plot. A plaque was erected to commemorate the bodies that were relocated and those still missing from the old graveyard.
Though many records from the early days of both cemeteries have been lost, due to a wind storm that blew over the house in which records were kept, some of the common causes of death are still known.
According to the information provided by Sparks, the most common diseases included “child birth, still born, premature, child bed fever, cholera, consumption, scarlet fever, diphtheria, heart disease, old age, natural causes, lung fever, heart fever, brain fever, typhoid fever, croup, pneumonia, teething dropsy and erysipelas, a type of skin infection.” Logan has also had it’s share of curious deaths, including “whooping cough, suicide, murder, water on the brain, decay of nature, softening of brain, accidentally blown to pieces, drowned, accidentally killed of a horse, suffocation, accidentally killed, summer complaint, accident by striking violently against a pole, gun shot wound, lock jaw, accidentally shot, kicked by a horse, neck broken, hanging himself and morphine poisoning.”
Logan’s cemetery is also the resting place for several influential people, including the founder of Nibley, the founder of Wellsville and May Swenson, the nationally acclaimed bohemian poet.
Swenson was a born and raised in Logan, born May 28, 1913, and attended USU, where her father taught mechanical engineering. She received a bachelor’s degree in 1934 and moved to New York in 1935, where she stayed for 50 years.
While in New York, Swenson worked until she had saved enough money to pay for her rent and food for a while, then focused on her writing, according to Michael Spooner, director of the University Press at USU. Spooner said Swenson embraced the Bohemian culture in New York and described her as a “free spirit.”
“She lived life the way she wanted to,” he said.
Though Swenson was well-known across the country, she wasn’t as renowned in her home town, though she requested to be buried in Logan’s cemetery. Spooner suggested that her open homosexuality, which would have been a taboo subject during her time, might have given her “more excuse to stay in New York.” Swenson was loved by anyone she came in contact with, Spooner said, and reportedly had three partners.
According to Poets.org, Swenson received fellowships from “the Guggenheim, Ford, Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundations, as well as a National Endowment for the Arts grant.” Before her death, Swenson reportedly wrote that “the best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a poem.”
Another popular resident of the Logan cemetery is the Weeping Lady monument, representing Julia E. Cronquist.
According to an article written by JoLynne J. Lyon for The Herald Journal, Cronquist was the mother of eight children, of which only three lived past childhood. After she lost her fourth and fifth children to scarlet fever, her house was quarantined, and so she was forced to keep the bodies in the house. Because of this, her husband, Olaf, buried them in the middle of the night.
It’s reported that Cronquist was often found in the cemetery crying, so, in 1914, her husband ordered a monument to be erected in her and her children’s honor. Cronquist died – many people say because of a broken heart – shortly after it was placed in the cemetery. The legend is that on the night of a full moon, you can hear her weeping throughout the cemetery.
Throughout the history of Logan’s cemetery, one mystery remains. The body of Eynon has never been found and there are no records of her burial. To this day, the plot of her husband remains alone, the spot next to him empty.
Sorenson asks, “Was she one of the 42 unknown in the Pioneer Plot?”
– k.vandyke@aggiemail.usu.edu