New hope for Highland Cemetery in Prairie Village

A Prairie Village cemetery that dates to before the Civil War is getting a new lease on life.

Marianne Noll, president of the board of director overseeing Highland Cemetery, gave Prairie Village City Council members an update earlier this month on the one-acre property at 65th Street and Hodges Drive.

Noll said the cemetery’s board met in May, its first meeting since forming again last year and the first annual meeting for the board in almost three decades.

“It’s been a huge learning curve for us, but it’s been a really good thing,” Noll said. “The cemetery is in better shape than it has been in many years.”

The cemetery was founded by the pioneering Nall family as well as an American Indian named John A. White. The earliest known burial was in 1860, but Noll said there are old stones with no dates, as well as American Indian gravesites.

A group of families chartered the cemetery with the state of Kansas in 1919, but little of its history was recorded until 1965, when the property’s plat was recorded with Johnson County.

For the next five decades, the cemetery fell on hard times with haphazard maintenance and struggling finances caused by scant sales of funeral lots.

Noll said a 2005 story in The Kansas City Star about the cemetery and its problems generated interest from school groups and Eagle Scouts, who helped clean up the site. Improved maintenance and a new sign led to an increase in lot sales, which provided needed revenue, she said.

The board is trying to sell the cemetery’s remaining 21 lots and 20 individual gravesites, as well as repair gravestones broken by vandals over the years, install placards detailing the cemetery’s history, add a water source for families who want to plant flowers on their relatives’ plots and add genealogical research to the cemetery’s website (http://www.highlandcemeteryprairievillage.com).

Noll asked the city for help in drawing public attention to the cemetery, which she said survives on donations and lot sales.

“Not everybody cares about history,” she said. “This is a little piece of history, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. Never to be gotten back.”

This story was originally published July 14, 2016 at 4:14 PM with the headline "New hope for Highland Cemetery in Prairie Village."