SALINE COUNTY, MISSOURI

Old Methodist Cemetery Photographs

According to Jean Feaster the Old Methodist Cemetery in Miami, Missouri is all but gone. To locate the cemetery she asked a local resident who had to ask his wife and neighbor, but they thought it "was that old cemetery up by the elevator in the timber." Jean found the cemetery, but it's a wreck.

When you approach Miami from the south on Highway 41, there is a fork in the road. If you take the right fork you will come to the Miami Cemetery. It's beautiful -- up on a hillside. To get to the Old Methodist Cemetery, you pass the Miami cemetery and turn left right before the bridge; go up the hill to the grain elevator; make another left and the cemetery is behind the weigh scales. Jean would have never found the cemetery except for a lone standing headstone seen from the road in a stand of trees. She parked behind the weigh station and went through a ditch to the "cemetery". Among the trees, waist high grass, and fallen timber she found about five standing headstones. She photographed the ones that could be read and submitted them to the Saline County MOGenWeb.

Jean found maybe 7 or 8 other headstones in pieces, buried in the debris, and laying against one of those individual fences around a grave. There were two ornamental fences and they had headstones inside them, but you could not read them. All but maybe three of the headstones were illegible. Jean's guess is that in another 5 years, the cemetery will be completely gone--even from memory.

According to Jean, these are the only stones that were the least bit legible. There is no indication other than one stone seen from the road that this is even a cemetery and she would have missed the one stone if someone had not told her where to look....Thanks, Jean, for sharing. The information below the photos is written by Jean. Click on the thumbnail to enlarge.


This one is Sophia, wife of Robert Ferril and I think the dates were 12-12-1832 to 11-14-1900. You know, I may have the dates switched on that. At the time I was writing this I was worried about snakes, so I wasn't really concentrating. Now that I think about it, I am sure that these dates are for Robert and the other dates are for Sophia.		This one could not really be read and could only be "felt" if you know what I mean. It is the stone of Robert Ferril and I think the dates were 2-15-1827 to 11-5-1911. But like I said, it was extremely dim and the light wasn't right to get a great photo (not that it would have shown much anyway.)

Stone of Hiram Hill. This one wasn't standing, but once we dug it out of the dirt and grass, it could still be read quite clearly.		Stone of "Hay Toliver" as near as I can tell. No relation of mine that I know of, but one of the four standing stones in Old Methodist Cemetery.

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This page last modified Monday, 02-Dec-2024 10:25:54 MST