Death on the frontier: Mortality patterns in Horse Prairie cemetery Franklin County, Illinois, 1840-2002

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2003 by Stockton, Ronald R

It is hard to imagine how profoundly difficult it was to survive on the nineteenth-century Illinois frontier.1 In many cases the soil was unbroken, the swamps were not drained, diseases were rampant, and medical care was scarce or non-existent. Death was a constant, if unwelcome, companion. Reconstructing those days is not easy, but a walk through an early cemetery reveals a time of struggle and tragedy, and of dreams unfulfilled. This is the story of one cemetery and of the tales that it tells.

Horse Prairie cemetery near Sesser in Franklin County was established in the 1840s. Today it is a churchyard cemetery associated with the Horse Prairie Baptist Church, which sits next to it. This is not the original location of the congregation and the cemetery is managed by an independent, non-sectarian governing board that is not connected with the church.2 Horse Prairie is a lovely cemetery, sitting on a modest hill surrounded by farmland.

The oldest grave in the cemetery is that of Bailey Fitzgerrell who died at the age of two in 1840. The most recent grave in the study is that of Ralph Stockton (father of this writer) who died in August 2002. There are 829 known graves in the cemetery, 683 of which have both birth and death dates.3 This paper is an analysis of those 683 graves. There are two limitations on the data: the death patterns are only loosely linked to the population base from which they are drawn and there is no information on the causes of deaths. Still, the pattern of burials gives insight into the nature of life and death in an earlier time. It is also possible to contextualize the cemetery in terms of historical, medical, and demographic trends.

Today Franklin County is easily accessible via Interstate 57 but, in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was very much an area of new and ongoing settlement. Much of the settlement of Southern Illinois began when it was a part of a colony of Virginia, having been captured from the British during the Revolutionary War by George Rogers Clark and a Virginia-based army. The earliest permanent European-American and African-American settlers arrived around 1812, but it was not until the 1840s that a sufficient number of people had arrived to incorporate a town.4 By then the current boundaries of the county were finalized-the southern half was separated in 1839 to form Williamson county.5 Barren Township, where the cemetery is located, was in the northwest corner of the county. Horse Prairie appears to be the first cemetery in the township, although there were surely now-forgotten private burial sites on farms.6 Within buggy distance (including the adjoining Goode township), there were only two other cemeteries in the 180Os with more than a few graves.7 In 1911 the city of Sesser opened the beautiful Maple Hill Cemetery just on the outskirts of the town and many people came to prefer that location over the more rural-pastoral setting of Horse Prairie.8 Maple Hill is today the cemetery of choice for most residents but, in the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth century, Horse Prairie was the major cemetery in the township. Its graves contained people from the general population and they most likely represented the overall pattern of burial in the community.

In typical frontier pattern, Franklin County was settled disproportionately by young men and young families.9 Of the 3,678 county residents in 1840, eighty percent were under thirty years of age (many of whom had been born in the county) and only eleven percent were forty years old or above (see Table 1). This was a society with few venerated grandparents. The gender ratio reflected a similar imbalance. Of the county population under fifteen years old, the male-female ratio was nearly equal at 100 to 101. But among the older groups (most of whom had migrated to the area), gender ratio shifted toward males. Of those fifteen to thirty-nine years old, the male margin was 7.6 percent; from forty to sixty-nine years old it was 14.5 percent; and at seventy years old and older there were 23.7 percent more males.

The demographic pattern in Franklin County roughly paralleled that of the state as a whole and the change across time was dramatic. A frontier region in 1840, by 1900 the state was fully settled and by the 1950s it was a part of the modern world. The population makeup reflected these changes. For example, the percentage of the state population under twenty-four years old in 1840 was 77.1 percent, in 1900 it was 51.9 percent, and in 1950 it was 37.6 percent. On the other end of the demographic scale, the pattern was equally distorted in the early years. The percentage of people who were forty-five years old and older in 1840 was a shockingly low 2.2 percent. By 1900 the figure was a more "normal" 17.3 percent and in 1950 it was 31.3 percent. Similar changes occurred with the gender ratios. In 1840 the state had a ratio of 1.17 in favor of males. By 1900, the ratio was 1.05, and by 1940 it was at parity.