Nemadji Cemetery

05/27/2026

Last summer I was committed full-time to the Douglas County Historical Society until we were able to hire new staff - while a worthy cause to be sure, it kept me out of the cemetery and away from the stories I so love to share.

While I have a son getting married and a daughter having twins this summer (actually scheduled for the same weekend - you can't make this stuff up), let's get our hands dirty, our hearts full and tell some great stories and restore some very worthy monuments, shall we?!

George W. DeLong was born in Ohio in February 1827.

In April 1853, he married Jane Ann Wheeler, born in betw 1827 – 1835 (no definitive record found).

Jane Ann’s father Portius, an early pioneer in Ohio whom they named a son after, is said to have built the Wheeler Tavern around 1835 near the Scioto River. According to local historians this was the first brick residence constructed in Hardin County. Tradition maintains that Wheeler Tavern was a station on the Underground Railroad, a network of contacts and places that aided escaping slaves making their way to the free North. Wheeler Tavern was built to accommodate travelers on the Old Sandusky Trail that ran from Cincinnati to Sandusky and Portius' log cabin was turned into a trading post. Reportedly Wheeler Tavern had guests who included Henry Clay, General Harrison and Stephen A. Douglas, whom Douglas County is named after.

Together they had 5 children, all born in Ohio: Dominik (1854), Lillie (1855), Portius (1858), Edward (1863), and Mark (1868).

In 1864, George, age 37 and listed as a farmer, served in the Union army during the Civil War in the 135th Regiment, Ohio Infantry (National Guard). The regiment mustered in May 1864 and left for Cumberland, MD right away. Assigned to duty as railroad guard on Baltimore RR at North Mountain, Opequan Station and Martinsburg until July 3. Operations about Harper’s Ferry July 4-7 and guard duty at Maryland Heights until September. Seven soldiers were lost during service during combat and 66 died of disease. The regiment mustered out Sept 1, 1864.
https://www.nps.gov/places/000/maryland-heights-mountain-fortress-of-harpers-ferry.htm

We don’t know exactly when the DeLong family arrived in Superior. The family is listed in Ohio until the 1880 Federal Census when they are in St. Paul, MN. They were here in Superior in 1889 as widow Jane is listed in the City Directory as such. George established a grocery store here and after his death it was co-owned by mother Jane and sons Portius and Edward in the 1892 City Directory. The store was located at 614 Tower Avenue. The building is no longer there but in the 1892 City Directory they had moved to 1205 Tower Avenue - that is the old Woolworth store, now VIP Pizza.

George died of heart issues here on June 9, 1889 and thereafter Jane is listed in the residence of their son Portius at 621 Grand Avenue (home no longer there). Jane dies in January of 1893 at his home located at 1514 11th Street East (also no longer there).
After both George and Jane passed, their sons Portius, Edward and Mark continue in this city for some time.

There is a William Clark DeLong that owned a prominent hardware store here and is listed as arriving from New York that may have been distantly related as Edward DeLong is working at the store in the 1896 City Directory. I went back 4 generations and couldn’t locate a familial connection.

The Restoration: When the volunteers arrived to place flags last week, they asked me to help locate a “DeLong” on their list. I checked the burial maps and saw that name but no marker was visible. Using the metal probe, I was able to connect with a marker about 10” below the surface. Having dug a test hole, I could see the letters “De L” on the stone. This weekend, when it wasn’t 42 degrees out, we extracted both George DeLong’s and wife Jane’s marble footstones and gave them a new foundation and cleaning. It was a muddy process that took about 3 hours.

Buried next to Jane, the map shows their son Edward however probing the ground revealed no sunken marker – as he was never married and his parent’s pre-deceased him it’s likely no marker was ever purchase or placed. In the wet, red clay earth that makes up Nemadji Cemetery, it’s fairly commonplace to locate sunken footstones – the stone itself is often in excess of 100 pounds and it’s likely these have been hidden from the world for decades.

Researching and restoring monuments like these is about more than stone and red clay. Every monument represents a life, a family, and a piece of history that deserves to be remembered and preserved.

We are honored to help keep these stones and stories standing for future generations.

05/24/2026

https://youtu.be/YfxBhUAuSFY?si=-iV2bKTQRuf8PclF

04/19/2026

Whether at our cemetery or any cemetery worldwide, no one should ever be forgotten.

The Child They Refused to Forget
In April 1912, as the cable ship Mackay-Bennett moved through the cold Atlantic, its crew searched not for survivors—but for the dead.
Among the wreckage, they found him.
A toddler.
Alone.
Drifting in silence where a great ship had vanished.
There was no name. No tag. No one came forward to claim him. He became known only as “The Unknown Child.” But to the hardened sailors who lifted his small body from the water, he was something more. He was a life that deserved to be remembered—not buried in anonymity.
The crew made a quiet decision.
They would not let him disappear.
Pooling their own money, they paid for a proper burial. A small white coffin. A granite headstone. And when they reached Fairview Lawn Cemetery, they carried him there themselves. Men who had faced the sea without fear now wept openly as they laid him to rest.
For decades, visitors came—leaving toys, flowers, and whispers of grief at a grave that carried no name. It stood not just for one child, but for all the children lost aboard the RMS Titanic.
Then, nearly a century later, science gave him back his identity.
In 2008, DNA testing revealed the truth:
He was Sidney Leslie Goodwin.
Nineteen months old. The youngest of six children traveling with their parents toward a new life in America.
None of them survived.
Today, his name is known—but the meaning of his grave has never changed.
Because long before anyone knew who he was, strangers chose to remember him.
And in doing so, they made sure he would never be lost again.

04/10/2026

Great read about another resting at Nenadji!

"Archive Dive" is a monthly podcast hosted by reporter Maria Lockwood. Episodes dip into the archives of historic events, people and places in Superior and Douglas County with local historians.

04/02/2026

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWQ_jwXDitx/?igsh=MWNkOXl6MTdha3E4OA==

02/05/2026

https://www.downsfh.com/obituary/james-jim-plunkett

Today we remember a great man in the cemetery business. Jim was instrumental in helping me learn the ropes when I took over Nemadji Cemetery and over the years has been supportive and helpful on many occasions when I reached out. RIP, Jimbo and many thanks 💜

James Jim M. Plunkett, 67, of Superior, died Tuesday, February 3, 2026, at his residence. Jim was born in Superior on June 21, 1958, the son of F. Rolland and Joan Malmquist Plunkett. While growing up he spent summers on his uncles farm and played basketball for Superior High School

12/01/2025

Happy Winter, all! The garland is up on the entry sign and the fresh snowfall has the resting grounds feeling very serene. We are wishing all a happy holiday season.

I'll leave you with a historic tidbit of the day - and an update on the Jessie Crawford story posted earlier.

Back in the day, before regular home delivery, folks in our area didn’t get mail dropped off at their door. Instead, newspapers like the Evening Telegram and the Superior Times printed lists of names of people who had letters waiting. If your name was in that edition, you walked over to the post office to pick up your mail.

That meant mail was a little event, a reason to check the newspaper and maybe run into neighbors at the post office.

The shift to regular home delivery didn’t happen all at once. Cities began receiving free city delivery in the 1860s (supported by USPS historical sources). Rural and smaller town areas, including northern Wisconsin, didn’t widely receive delivery until the late 1890s and early 1900s under Rural Free Delivery (RFD).

So by the early 1900s, give or take a decade, the name-in-the-paper, “come pick up your letters” era was mostly gone, replaced by delivery straight to your mailbox.

Recently, Newspapers.com (a subscription service) added the Evening Telegram papers to their site - previously, I would have to search the fragile, physical bound-editions at the Douglas County Historical Society for information making for a painstakingly slow research process. Now, I'm able to execute a search on all the newspapers for any subject matter and it will take me directly to the information - a real game-changer in the research gig.

Our young Jessie Crawford was listed two different times in the years leading up to her death as having letters to collect. I'll drop those notices in the photos and also the paper listing instructions about mail pickup. Very interesting times to live in if you consider trudging through the snow right now to fetch a piece of mail!

11/04/2025

Jessie E. Crawford was born July 25, 1877 in Ontario, Canada, the third child of Scottish-born Robert Brown Crawford and Canadian-born Margaret D. Lawrie. Her older sisters were Bertha (1874) and Margaret (1876), and a younger brother, Murray, arrived in 1880. The family married roots trace back to St. Catherine’s in Niagara, Ontario in 1873.
By 1881 they appear on an Ontario census in Middlesex-along with a 20-year-old live-in servant, which hints that the Crawfords were doing reasonably well.
Around 1890-1891 the family crossed into the United States. Robert likely went first to secure work and housing, and by the time they appear in the Superior, Wisconsin city directory in 1891, Jessie was a teenager. They settled at 155 W. 4th Street near the Nemadji River. Jessie and her sisters attended the Nelson Dewey School, where she participated in Memorial Day 1891 programs and once recited a piece charmingly titled “A Picnic in Winnipeg.”
The Crawfords bounced around Superior a few times-first to a two-story house on East 2nd Street, then to another home at what would now be the corner of 26th Ave East and 2nd Street. Today, both spots are just…empty lots. Time can be cruel to buildings.
Robert worked as a yardmaster for the Northern Pacific Railroad, a tough job in a bustling, industrial port city. Superior in the 1890s wasn’t exactly a postcard: dirty, noisy, full of transient laborers, and short on comfort. A girl Jessie’s age would have been judged on modesty, household skills, and church attendance, not hobbies or dreams. Daily life meant hauling water, tending fires, cooking from scratch, and endless hand-scrubbing—no “little house on the prairie” romance.
In June and July of 1894, local newspapers reported Jessie as “quite ill” with “quick consumption,” a fast-moving form of tuberculosis. Medical care then was 80% educated guess, 20% luck. Antibiotics didn’t exist, germ theory was still new, and TB was a constant, terrifying threat. On Sunday, September 30, 1894, Jessie died at just 17 years old. Her funeral was held at home two days later, as was common.
We know Jessie attended Nelson Dewey High School and may have completed her formal education early. It’s possible she even studied at the Superior Normal School, maybe following her sister Bertha into teaching—dreams cut short before they could root.
The rest of the family stayed in Superior until 1904, then returned to Canada briefly before relocating to Washington, where Robert applied for U.S. naturalization. Sister Bertha became a career teacher and never married, passing away in Washington in 1944. Margaret married Thomas Andrew and lived to 71, eventually buried in Ontario. Brother Murray worked his way up to an executive position with Northern Pacific Railroad before dying at 57 in Washington.
Jessie didn’t leave diaries or descendants. What remains are scraps in newspapers, a few census entries, and the vague outline of a young life caught between countries, crowded boomtown streets, and crude medicine. But even that faint record tells us something: she worked hard, contributed quietly, and mattered to the people who mourned in that house in 1894. For many in the 19th century, that’s all history ever bothered to write down-so today, we write the rest.

08/15/2025

Two Tiny Lives in the Shadows of History

In the Douglas County Courthouse, tucked away in the Register of Deeds office, are the official records of life’s two great milestones-birth and death. Since 1907, Wisconsin law has required these events to be recorded. Before that, record-keeping was patchy at best. An early attempt in 1852 barely got off the ground, and although an 1878 law was more successful, countless lives before 1907 slipped through the cracks of history, leaving little more than a name on a gravestone.
When I do research, I arrive with my fingers crossed, hoping for one of those elusive pre-1907 records. Sometimes I’m lucky-the details spill out from a page, and a life suddenly feels more tangible. But more often there is nothing. And when there is nothing, that humble marker in the cemetery becomes a timeworn voice, whispering the only testimony to a life that once was.
One such whisper comes from a small, weathered stone in Superior, its inscription softened by nearly a century and a half of wind and rain. The name is faded-only “_ _ nnie” can be made out now-but when it was recorded for FindAGrave in 2010, it was listed as “Johnnie Zachau.” No record of his birth or death exists in the courthouse. No mention in the Superior Times-our city’s primary newspaper of the day-sheds light on his short life.
Yet his marker tells us what paper records do not: he died on March 18, 1882, at just 1 month and 7 days old. From that, we can work backward to find his birth date-February 11, 1882. His stone, carved in the form of a small tree trunk, speaks in silent symbolism: a life cut short before it had the chance to grow. Based on the few Zachau family burials in the area, I believe his parents were likely August and Augusta Caroline Zachau, early settlers of Superior.
A second small grave nearby tells an equally brief and silent story. The stone reads simply: “Richard Zachau - June 17, 1938.” One date, no age, no epitaph. In cemetery symbolism, that means he lived and died on the same day-or perhaps was stillborn. By 1938, death records were mandatory in Wisconsin, yet no record of Richard’s birth or death could be found in either Wisconsin or neighboring Minnesota.
The trail grows stranger. When I checked the death record index at the courthouse, I found two entries from July 1938-both redacted by the State of Wisconsin. In the 1990s, all stillbirth records were removed from county courthouses and sent to the state, leaving a hole in the local archives. If Richard’s record was among them, it now rests in state custody, far from the cemetery where his name endures in stone.
For both Johnnie and Richard, the paper trail is thin to vanishing. But their stones-small, quiet, and steadfast-remain. They are not just markers of loss, but the only surviving proof that these children once existed. For now, until a hidden document or yellowed newspaper clipping surfaces, these memorials will continue to do the work of history, holding space for two lives too short to be fully told.