CEMETERY'S HISTORY BEING RECORDED

The grave of War of 1812 veteran Col. William McGuire is located near South High Street.

Dawn Detring and Bill Eddleman look at the monument to Confederate Col. W. L. Jeffers at Jackson City Cemetery.

The Cape Girardeau County Genealogist Society is currently collecting information on the Jackson City Cemetery in the society's ongoing effort to provide accurate and complete data on county cemeteries for current and future genealogists.

Dawn Detring, past president, and Bill Eddleman, president, took time to explain why the project is important.

Many of the old cemetery transcriptions are incomplete in the county, which creates road blocks and dead ends for genealogists researching ancestors in the area.

The group hopes to eventually have a complete map and other vital information on all cemeteries located in Cape Girardeau County.

Besides recording the larger cemeteries, Eddleman and Detring want to record any small farm cemeteries that exist.

The group records the information they find into a database program that can be accessed by genealogists.

The 10-member committee working on the cemetery project is also putting the information in a form that is friendly to genealogists. Instead of alphabetical listings of graveyards, the lists produced by the society are by location. This helps genealogists make key finds in minutes on a computer rather than the years it might take researching and searching through cemeteries on foot.

The historical value of Jackson City Cemetery is priceless. Many Civil War graves are located there, as well as veterans of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The first doctor west of the Mississippi, Dr. Zenas Priest, is buried there.

A section of the cemetery vividly displays the effects of a cholera outbreak in Jackson in 1852. Jackson had another outbreak 19 years earlier that took 128 lives. After panic in 1852 led to residents fleeing there were few left to bury the dead.

The grave of Col. William McGuire, who came to Jackson from Kentucky in 1818, is buried there.

An influential citizen, McGuire was also a veteran of the War of 1812. He was captured at the Battle of River Raisen by a British/Indian force, but was later released. He operated a tanyard in Jackson and spent one term in the Missouri Legislature, which was old hand for him from his days as a legislator in Kentucky. McGuire died July 21, 1857.

Jackson City Cemetery's most famous resident is perhaps Col. W. L. Jeffers, a Confederate officer who attacked a Union militia company near Jackson in April 1862. In August of that year he attacked four companies of the 12th Cavalry, Missouri State Militia on Crooked Creek in Bollinger County.

After the war the Jackson native ran a hotel in Dexter, but he left for Texas to try to better his health. He died in Corpus Christi, Texas. A few months later his body was exhumed from a grave in Texas and transported back home to Jackson for burial.

Charles P. Medley, a prominent Jackson citizen in the 19th century is buried there. His grandfather, Ignatius Medley, served in the Revolutionary War and married a granddaughter of Daniel Boone, his father was a Kentucky state senator, Charles was a farmer and stock raiser, he fought in the Civil War.

Linus Sanford who served as circuit clerk from 1828 until his death in 1861, missing out on only one four-year term during that period, is buried in the cemetery.

Johnson Ranney was a practicing lawyer in New Madrid, Benton and later Jackson. He was made a judge of the common pleas court in 1851, a position he held until the Civil War. Later he was elected state senator. After a stint at senator he was elected as a representative of Cape Girardeau County for one term.

The Jackson City Cemetery, located near Jackson High School, has a lot of history to offer. Many veterans of past wars are buried there and this Memorial Day honor them by remembering their sacrifices, which have had lasting effects on all of our lives.