You won’t find the Pellsville Pioneer Cemetery in Pellsville. You won’t find Pellsville there either. There is no Pellsville. It was planned in the 1800s for Vermilion County, in east central Illinois, and never incorporated. So Pellsville cemetery sits in Butler Township (pop. 947), 40 miles northeast of Champaign. It’s off the beaten path, as in you must travel unpaved farmland to reach it.
But when you reach it, you will know. The cemetery is apart from the landscape. Hard winds bow the miles of green cornstalks that surround it. Dave Anderson, Butler Township supervisor, periodically mows a wide moat of sorts around the small burial ground, which gives it the look of an island.
Which, in a way, it is.
Compared with the orderly rows of corn and stony wind turbines spinning in the distance, Pellsville cemetery is a wild rumpus. Crumbling tombs stand against storm clouds; meadowlarks dive into waist-high grasses and disappear only to burst into the sky. When the wind flattens the grass you catch glimpses of more headstones. And the 1 1/2 acres itself is swallowed whole by a rowdy bouquet of purple prairie clover and leadplant, black-eyed Susan and rattlesnake master, wild quinine and spiked lobelia and white sweet clover.
Pellsville cemetery, which holds 44 pioneers and contains more than 80 native flowers and grasses, is largely untouched prairie, at its dazzling peak in midsummer. It is considered, by the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory and Illinois Department of Natural Resources, “Grade-A” prairie, or “virgin” prairie. It has never been plowed, grazed or uprooted. It is as close as we get to what Illinois looked like before European pioneers rolled in, around the 1820s.
You’ve heard of prairies, maybe live on a Prairie Street or maybe shop at a Prairie Mall. But the thing itself is rare in Illinois, the Prairie State. Indeed, the colonists, often German and Irish, who settled the vast untamed fields of east central Illinois — later known as the Grand Prairie, stretching from roughly Champaign to the Great Plains — wished they knew less about prairies themselves. They didn’t trust a land with so few trees and so many wolves. They spoke in nautical metaphors — oceans of grass, seas of green — to convey their unease. Said Barbara Garvey of the Museum of the Grand Prairie, outside Champaign: “You don’t walk into 6- or 8-foot-tall grasses when you don’t know what you’ll find on the other end.”
So they plowed and developed the prairie, and when they died, they were buried in it.
Which is where this familiar story takes a turn.
Illinois once had 22 million acres of tall-grass prairie. Today, only 2,300 acres remain. But of those acres, many of the finest examples of untouched, pre-settlement prairie sit on 29 tenuous pioneer cemetery plots, fragile islands of untamed land in what is now an ocean of agricultural conformity. Together these cemeteries, often left undisturbed because they are burial grounds, make up about 50 acres. It is as if the pioneers, in their deaths, left us a few seeds of life.
“Did you Google Pellsville?” Chris Benda asked. “Doesn’t come up.”
He climbed from his Subaru and immediately dove into the Pellsville thicket. Benda is 40, from Minnesota, and for the past decade has worked as a botanist, serving as president of the Illinois Native Plants Society and now with the Illinois Natural History Survey. He drives around the state and studies its flora, keeping tabs on unusually well-preserved sites like Pellsville. He spotted a clump of white sweet clover. “Terrible,” he said. “Invasive. So I tug out the whole root” — which he demonstrated — “and now it’s dead. Good.”
He looked across the cemetery.
Birds trilled and darted, wind lifted and fell, rain spit and stopped.
“Really the only reason these places have been saved is because some settlers once decided they would bury their dead among the flowers, partly because it was closer to home and easier,” he said. “I bet there aren’t any actual rare plants in this site. Everything out here is fairly common. Yet it’s beautiful and priceless. Why? It’s important for the way it is growing, not in clumps, but well-spaced. We have to consider the assemblage, variety and structure of a community of plants and flowers and grasses. Without dead people here, this spot would be like the surrounding fields.”
It’s the ecosystem, stupid.
He picks a leaf of showy tick trefoil and puts it on my shirt and peels it off, which sounds like Velcro. He holds up a prairie dock, which is a single large leaf, rough on the surface and cool to the touch despite the July heat. He points at the compass plants, which align themselves roughly north-south, hence the name, and resemble a child’s drawing of a plant. He noted the orange daylily and grasses that shouldn’t be here — but in many cases are here courtesy of the pioneer immigrants, and practically native by now. He said this may be his favorite site.
Headstones are scattered about, many so weathered that the surfaces are smooth and the lettering faded. The stone for Charlotte — her last name is lost — rests at a 45-degree angle. Black-eyed Susans wave above her. Another stone is so ancient that only the “ant” in “infant” can be easily read. Some of the stones are black from the controlled fires used to manage plant growth. Some are speckled like eggs. Where the land rises to the north, a wrought iron fence holds what looks like a family plot; many pioneer cemeteries began as family plots, then expanded to neighbors.
Benda said he’s heard stories of biologists finding areas this perfect and weeping.
However, this is also one of the five pioneer prairie cemeteries in Illinois without formal Department of Natural Resources designation as a nature preserve, heritage landmark or land and water reserve. It is, simply, owned by Butler. Anderson, who has been township supervisor for 32 years, said Pellsville “will be here as long as I am supervisor.” Every spring he holds burns, and Grand Prairie Friends, a nonprofit that works to preserve and restore Illinois prairie, comes around to uproot invasive grasses and hold annual sales of prairie seeds.
Jamie Ellis, president of the board of directors of Grand Prairie Friends, says he’s relieved that Butler is caring for its patch of prairie. But he adds that until about five years ago, some neighbors complained that the prairie, which they called weeds, was disrespectful to the dead. He said his group offered to buy the land from Butler and was turned down; he said the township also declined formal preservation status, not wanting the layer of state regulation that comes with it. Anderson said that was true — they can handle Pellsville themselves.
That worries Benda.
He’s heard stories of farmers plowing up pioneer cemeteries once they hear a state agency is interested. “(Pellsville) is obviously cared for,” he said, stepping around a strand of purple stems. “It’s in amazing condition. But without (official protection), it’s not OK forever.”
Many of the 29 pioneer cemetery prairies identified by the state are clustered in east central Illinois; the rest are scattered, some on the border of Iowa, some north of Peoria. The sites average about 2 acres and 114 species of plants and grasses. Most were established between the 1830s and 1880s; Pellsville’s first grave was made 1872, and its last was for Eliza Livingston and William, her husband, who died a few months apart in 1910. The sites are maintained often by neighborhood volunteers or the townships and forest preserves that own them. Some are somewhat inaccessible by foot; a handful are still open to fresh burials.
They hold parents, teenagers, infants, Civil War soldiers and veterans of the War of 1812. Their headstones often came from rock quarried in local creeks and rivers, and in some cases were put there by later ancestors of the dead, to replace wood markers. Eventually though, many of those ancestors died. Families lost their links to the prairie.
The cemeteries sat abandoned.
Until the 1960s, when Robert Betz, a botanist at Northeastern Illinois University (who died in 2007), started drawing connections between a handful of pioneer cemeteries and what remained of prairie ecosystems. He started with Vermont Cemetery in Naperville, now a part of the Forest Preserve of Will County. (It’s a glaring reminder of the benefits of being protected, standing a full 18 inches higher than the unprotected, soil-eroded residential-commercial land that surrounds it.) In 1976, inspired by Betz, the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory began an extensive study of sites with pre-settlement vegetation, which later became a cornerstone of nature preservation in Illinois. Botanists and biologists crisscrossed the state for years, visiting 4,000 cemetery sites to find what was left of even the narrowest sliver of prairie microcosm.
That is how most of the other 28 pioneer cemetery prairies were found.
But it wasn’t always easy to persuade townships and farmers to recognize what they had. The idea of controlled burns in a burial ground didn’t sit well with many. The preservationists’ motives were occasionally questioned. Said Ellis of Grand Prairie Friends, which maintains a number of pioneer cemetery prairies: “It’s a gentle back-and-forth. Ironically, you have people who want to visit graves of their ancestors and complain it’s covered in weeds. So you explain, it’s not weeds, it’s original prairie, our ideas about burial have changed, this is sacred space but also our biological heritage. You try to identify shared values. I’m still not sure we have convinced everyone.”
Consider Loda Cemetery Prairie, west of Pellsville. Now owned by Grand Prairie Friends, it’s 4 acres of Grade-A prairie, a riotous contrast to the manicured Pine Ridge Cemetery alongside it. Pine Ridge had been prairie land and in the early 1980s, Loda intended to expand the cemetery into the untouched acres. According to reports about the town meetings at the time, when preservationists suggested protection, one Loda official suspected them of wanting something buried in the undeveloped acreage. When the point was raised that the prairie was already a pioneer potter’s field — homeless men and unknown travelers who died in Loda are there in unmarked graves — a Loda resident replied that nobody cared about those people.
Beckie Green, a part-time church secretary in Loda, is now steward of its prairie.
“To be honest, I didn’t know a thing about this place when I was growing up here,” Green said. Now, through the University of Illinois, she’s a certified master naturalist. She weens invasive grasses, watches over 133 native plants as well as the 8 acres Grand Prairie bought as a buffer around the land. “It’s what settlers saw and Native Americans saw. It’s our history, it’s on the decline. So I do my part. Still, I do get people who walk over and say, ‘You know, I could mow that mess for you.’”
Loda Cemetery Prairie is a fifth of the remaining pioneer cemetery prairies left in Illinois. It erupts from the earth in a long single rectangular undulating wave, its clumps of New Jersey tea dipping their snowball heads into swaying thatches of goldenrod that brush against last season’s big blue stem, now tanned and dry and poking above the Pine Ridge fence.
Viva Siddall, a former medical educator and research assistant, comes here often. She grew up in Loda, moved to Chicago, then retired here. She likes knowing, because of preservation efforts, that Pine Ridge will always overlook the Loda prairie, a stone’s throw from her son, who is buried here, killed several years ago by a drunken driver. “Now I have non-Hodgkin lymphoma, so soon I’ll join him here myself. It’s a beautiful spot. Butterflies are everywhere. The only sound is wind in the trees. When I’m laying flowers, truck drivers on (Interstate) 57 sometimes see you and honk. It’s comforting.”
A styrofoam wreath creaks.
A beetle wanders the headstone of Mary L., who died at 15, then flutters to the grave of someone who “lived and who died and …” — the stone is so old, that’s all that’s readable.
Nearby, Benda gets out of his car and tugs up a stalk of white sweet clover and mutters to himself. He pushes away tall grasses to reveal a large stone with a plaque that reminds anyone who may stumble on it: This is virgin prairie, preserved to honor the pioneers of Illinois.
Then he lets the grass slide back and the memorial vanishes from sight.