South of the Border, "Grandview: a cemetery for pioneer children"

South of the Border,

Column No. 25

Columnist's note: A camper from Cut Bank staying in the campground just west of Whitlash, told me several weeks ago, "If you are looking for an interesting story about this area, check out the Grandview Cemetery. Everyone buried there was less than five years old."

Asking around I was given the name of Sharon Lerum as a contact for information. She's a ranch wife who lives just south of the cemetery and is the volunteer caretaker for the two-acre plot. We met me a couple of weeks ago at the intersection of Strawberry Road and the Oilmont Road, about 15 miles southwest of Whitlash in Toole County. We drove east about a mile further on Oilmont Road and turned south at a small sign that read "Grandview Cemetery." A mile down a dirt two-track we came to the cemetery-marked with a sign and entrance gate.

I learned from Sharon Lerum that for nearly a century only children were buried in the prairie cemetery, the last child buried in 1920. Then, in 2005 an adult was buried, the first since the cemetery was begun in 1911. Here's some of what I learned about this prairie cemetery that fell in to disuse for nearly a century.

The community of Grandview was homesteaded in the early 1900's

Grandview is a general area north of Galata (west of Chester along US Hwy 2), where Galata Road intersects Oilmont Road. Most of the original homesteaders were second generation Norwegian settlers from Minnesota. A post office (in a house) opened in 1910. Later the Grandview School was built. Some say Grandview took its name from the beautiful view looking north to the Sweet Grass Hills.

Sharon Lerum had documents listing names, birthdates, dates of death and causes of death for eight known children buried at Grandview. The first documented death was in 1911 and the last in 1920. Lerum explained that burials began at the site in 1911 with three unidentified graves, likely children. In 1913 Mrs. Annette Forseth, an immigrant widow from Norway, donated the two acre-plot for a cemetery. Three years later her two week-old grandchild, Elma Florence Brown, was buried in the cemetery.

I assumed I would find a number of graves resulting from some major epidemic and all of one period. That was not the case as the lengths of times the children lived varied from stillborn, or just a few days old, to a 10 year-old buried in 1920. The last burial was Francis Hurt who died from complications from the 1918 flu epidemic that claimed about 675,000 lives in the U.S.

Cause of deaths varied from the "summer complaint," an acute diarrhea chiefly among infants in hot weather to the accidental death of a year-and-a-half old girl who "upset a grindstone upon herself." "Stillborn" births accounted for most deaths listed in the statistics for Grandview.

In 1900, 30 percent of all deaths in the United States occurred in children less than five years of age. A researcher who studied infant mortality rates in a "Montana homesteading county" in 1917 found that "...neighbor women attended over half the deliveries while husbands delivered one baby out of eight." Where births were not attended by a physician infant mortality rates tended to be highest. For homesteaders towns were often miles away with few formal medical practices available. Planned physician-assisted births were often foiled by bad weather or impassable roads, forcing reliance on a midwife or husband to perform the delivery.

It was said of turn of the century infant mortality rates, "...ranchers could be expected to lose 20 percent or more of their children in the first year alone, and probably more before adolescence." On farms and ranches sources of infectious disease were everywhere, usually unrecognized and, therefore, were poorly controlled. The study concluded, "Lack of clean water, free of fecal (intestinal) contamination, was probably the greatest problem of all."

Why only children in the Grandview Cemetery for nearly a century?

The Grandview Cemetery, like many frontier-era cemeteries, was started with the idea that a large graveyard would be needed for a growing community. At some point the Matteson family, farming east of the cemetery, donated a plot of land to build a church next to the cemetery. That plan was abandoned when agriculture flagged early on and many homesteaders left the area.

Sharon Lerum explained, "First, a lot of farmers and ranchers left the area. Churches in the area added cemeteries that were more convenient to access than Grandview. For many years neighbors tried to keep up the cemetery but it deteriorated." A local Boy Scout troop built a fence around the plot which helped preserve the graveyard. Grandview is now part of the South Toole County Cemetery District.

Lerum explained about the two adults buried at Grandview. "Amby Scalese," Lerum said, "lived just west of here on the Oilmont Road and died in 2006. She was the first adult ever buried at Grandview. Tom Ambuehl was from Shelby. He visited relatives in the area and decided he wanted his ashes scattered here. His family put up a nice memorial in his honor."

Lerum stated that she and her husband, Monte, plan to be buried at Grandview. She added, "I think people didn't want be buried in a cemetery that wasn't being taken care of. Now that we have it fixed up and maintained, we are getting some inquiries about the availability of plots." The Grandview Cemetery may yet have a larger role as more than "a cemetery for pioneer children."