When trying to tell the history of Gladstone, Richard King believes that you can&rsquo;t just start when the city was founded &mdash; you need to go back, way back in time.</p><p>&ldquo;We concluded that you can&rsquo;t just tell the history of Gladstone because it is not even 60 years old,&rdquo; said King, a spokesman for the city. &ldquo;The history was way before Gladstone (existed) so we went way back to the early 1800s and started.&rdquo; </p><p>And as part of that, volunteers with the Friends of the Atkins-Johnson Farm in Gladstone will take people on tours of three old cemeteries this weekend to help tell the history of the area. </p><p>Guides will take people on tours of the Big Shoal, New Stark and Fountain Waller cemeteries, which are located in or around the Carriage Hills neighborhood in Kansas City, North.</p><p>Big Shoal Cemetery is at North Jackson Avenue and Northeast 64th Terrace; New Stark Cemetery at Northeast Shady Lane Drive, Fountain Waller at Northeast 63rd Street and North Cypress Avenue.</p><p>The tours will be from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday. Parking is limited and people are encouraged to park on North Jackson, just east of the Big Shoal Cemetery.</p><p>Although the event is free, donations will be accepted to help restore the Big Shoal Cemetery. A Clay County judge this summer transferred ownership of the cemetery to Gladstone, which plans to include it in the historic preservation of the nearby Atkins-Johnson Farm.</p><p>&ldquo;We are preserving the historical stories that are the fabric of what this whole county is about,&rdquo; said Melinda Mehaffy, Gladstone&rsquo;s Economic Development administrator.</p><p>In its heyday, the Big Shoal church was socially prominent in the county and used as a polling site where people went to vote, Mehaffy said. It was a landmark. </p><p> Last month, the city and the Friends of the Atkins-Johnson Farm cleaned headstones in the Big Shoal Cemetery while the city&rsquo;s Public Works Department reset and repaired the monuments. </p><p>The other two cemeteries are on land once owned by Fountain Waller, a farmer in Clay County before the Civil War who deeded the land to the county to be reserved as burial grounds &mdash; one for his family and the other for former slaves and their families.</p><p>In addition to bringing awareness of the importance of maintaining cemeteries, Mehaffy believes such tours will help people learn more about their neighborhoods.</p><p>An opportunity to learn more about people who are buried in our county, where they came from and why they were of importance to anyone besides family and friends is important, she said. </p><p><hr class="infobox-hr-separator" /> <div class="infobox"> <strong><span class="infobox-head">GLADSTONE</span></strong><br /> </div>