iStock/Kristin Colwell
A team of Maple Grove Historical Preservation Society members has begun an aerial data collection project that uses remote sensing devices and cutting-edge imaging techniques. Led by Michael Tomiak, a cultural heritage and remote sensing specialist, the group is creating a 3D, interactive website that will revolutionize how residents experience the community’s historic cemeteries. Included will be links to biographies of our earliest settlers.
While the project is underway, maps of Maple Grove and Osseo cemeteries and familial records are available to local genealogical sleuths on findagrave.com.
William Ewing (1816-1890) arrived in 1851 shortly after legendary explorers Pierre Bottineau and Pierre Louis Gervais. In 1854, Ewing led a group of 12 abolitionist families from a farming community in Adrian, Michigan, to the Minnesota Territory and settled in Maple Grove Township and neighboring Brooklyn Township (now Brooklyn Park). Ewing and his first and second wives, Lovina Blowers Ewing and Diadema Brown Davis Ewing, are buried at Brooklyn and Maple Grove Union Cemetery. Established in 1862 during the Civil War, it is also the resting place of Hiram Blowers, William Bosworth, Elias Brown, Seneca Brown, Oscar Ruel Champlin and Charles Savage, who relocated from Adrian, Michigan, as well.
A visit to St. Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery on Bass Lake Road brings you to the resting places of our earliest Irish settlers, the Catherine, Devery, John, Martin, Patrick and Peter families, and their neighbors Daniel Hennessey, Patrick Darmody and John Peters, who came to Maple Grove between 1855–1857.
Our first town clerk, John Morrison Eddy and his wife, Mary Evans Eddy, rest at Rush Creek Cemetery. Formed in 1861, the cemetery shelters the Chester Evans and William Evans families, the Laflin families of Vermont and the Kerr families from Pennsylvania who arrived between 1854–1856.
Weaver Lake Cemetery, established in 1868, houses multiple members of the Weaver family, originally of New Brunswick, Canada. The Luther Hoff and William Brooks families of Ohio and the John Cook family from England, all 1854–1856 settlers, are buried here too. Many of our early German settlers are at St. Paul’s Evangelical Church Cemetery and Immanuel Methodist Cemetery.
