Oklahoma's "invisible cemeteries" and two local women who find them

Mar. 22—It's not a far stretch of the imagination when traveling the red dirt roads of the Sooner State to imagine what it might have been like back in the era of bumping along those roads in horse and wagon, or on horseback, to travel and return home, get work done or go to a community or tribal get-together.

Looking out on the Great Plains landscape today, in the areas around Stillwater and Payne County, it appears always the same, yet it is ever-changing with the seasons and years, as life goes on.

The hawks hunt, the coyotes yip, the cedars sigh, the stars are often bright and vast, the skies are vibrant in colors no painting can truly capture and wildflowers cover the fields in spring, then blacken and gray in winter after the crops are sown and reaped.

But, it is the cycles of human nature — birth, life and death — that have intrigued two long-time area residents so much so that they have become amateur historians who specifically research and go find "invisible" or often abandoned graveyards, cemeteries, homestead final resting places and Native American burial grounds.

They then plot them on a huge map and document their findings for historical, cultural and genealogical reasons to share with many different groups and people from academics, to theological groups, to civic groups, families and more.

The stories and places they have discovered, now a couple years into the project, rival any dramas of the old Wild West or tall tales told about the area, said Rose Marie Knight, 80, of Perry, Oklahoma and Pam Pettigrew, 60, of Perry, Oklahoma.

Knight and Pettigrew are part of a larger group that helps the Noble County Genealogy Society and the Oklahoma Historical Society, as well as similar, various groups in Payne and Logan Counties — and wherever their travels and leads take them across the state — in putting final resting places on the map and connecting the dots of people, places and events.

In addition to finding and charting a comprehensive map to where people are buried, they will reach out to community members and landowners to help get burial areas cleaned up or fenced off, especially if they are completely abandoned, and they work to connect families to deceased members who may not know where their earlier kin may have been laid to rest.

"We got a four-foot by four-foot map, and we're putting everything we find on that map," Knight said. "When I took over deciding to make that map, I wanted to get directions to each cemetery so people could find it. I just couldn't do it all myself."

Originally, it was going to be just Knight's undertaking, she said, but when she started the project, she soon realized she needed help, and she now works with a group.

Knight and Pettigrew are usually the duo who step out together to go find history.

Knight said when she started the project, there were about 40 burial areas known throughout the mentioned counties, which they did find.

"We're now up to 50 or so," she said. They have likely driven and walked thousands of miles by now.

On a sunny, spring day in March, they find themselves in a farmer's field — last investigated and reported as the Tedford Cemetery outside Orlando, Oklahoma, which straddles Payne and Logan Counties — to see about an old rumor of a sheriff who may or may not have chased outlaws and been shot dead, then buried where he lay back in the late 1800s.

"Because that's how they did that back then," Knight said, who used to catch the school bus in that area.

As a child, she never knew it was an abandoned cemetery with 15-20 people there, but contains only two to three, now-visible, head and foot stones.

The rest of the graves are unmarked, but Knight and Pettigrew said the obvious divets in the ground are likely where people are buried.

"Or perhaps he was the outlaw and killed by a sheriff, no one knows," Pettigrew said. "But we did find his grave — we did have his name — and it is fenced off from the cattle. We just can't find anymore information on the man or what may have happened."

A headstone confirms part of the rumor, anyway. Andrew J. Yates died at age 36 in the late 1800s, and his grave appeared to be inscribed with a message from his wife. Next to his grave was an indention in the turf.

Pettigrew said, "Someone might be buried there. Maybe his wife."

The two women walked gingerly around the site and peered down at another broken headstone — also from the late 1800s — and probably a foot stone, and maybe even pieces of the shovel that buried the deceased.

They also stopped at a cemetery that's one of two known, all-Black cemeteries in the area, the Doxey Cemetery, also known as Green Cemetery or Washington Cemetery, located in Noble County, but more than likely had connections to the once segregated, all-Black community in Stillwater.

"It's got a whole bunch of names. It needs a lot of cleaning, and it's in disrepair," Pettigrew said.

Many headstones were unrecognizable as such, many hand-made from cement or hand-carved. All were quite old and some were natural.

One family had placed a newer headstone to mark a relative placed there from the late 1800s. The Doxey Cemetery is actually relocated to the area it is in currently, likely moved in the 1970s when Lake McMurtry was developed and the cemetery was in the area of construction and would have been lost.

The places where people are buried in Oklahoma are as different and distinct as the people who are buried there — whatever the site is will often tell you a lot about who the people were and what they were committed to, Pettigrew said.

For example, Pettigrew said, graveyards are at churches, a homestead plot is where they bury people on their land, cemeteries are land that's often been donated and "then there are sacred burial grounds for the Indians."

"This area has a lot of burial grounds of the Otoe," Knight said. "We have found a lot of their places, but we couldn't find them all, and we can't go on their land without an Otoe with us.

"Over in Ponca, we found an Indian burial ground abandoned, and we went in and found they had built little houses over the graves," Knight said. It's now on their map.

Knight has lived in Stillwater, outside Orlando, for a time in the Flint Hills of Kansas and now lives in Perry. She has stayed in the area for most of her 80 years.

Her family cut hay, and her father provided livestock to a lot of the rodeos in the area and was a rodeo clown for a time. Her mother worked as a mid-wife in the 1930s and 40s.

Pettigrew also grew up in Oklahoma and hails from Enid. She lived around the country for some time in adulthood after marrying her husband who was in the Army, and when they returned to Oklahoma, their family settled in Perry.

To say they know Oklahoma, and specifically the aforementioned areas, is an understatement.

Knight is fascinating in her breadth and width of historical knowledge of all the areas she lived in and throughout the local counties: the people, their names, where they came from, who was born to whom, what they did, who they married, their children, how they lived and how they died and, of course, anything scandalous or unusual.

As she and Pettigrew drive, Pettigrew sips on her tea and follows Knight's directions, while Knight nurses a hot chocolate and points out every landmark, every falling down structure, every homestead. She narrates all she knows aloud about where they are, recalling local history as far back as the 1800s.

The "invisible cemetery project" for Knight and Pettigrew is a tangible expression they can plot on a map of people and families with connections to place; the facts and places they have dug up are already invaluable to historical institutions and local people.

That day in March while driving the backroads of Stillwater, Perkins, Orlando and Perry, a "natural cemetery" outside of Stillwater was pointed out.

"That's where people are buried, no embalming, no casket, no headstone, no names," Pettigrew said. "There are names listed there, just not on headstones."

Also pointed out was, in a thicket of trees, back off the highway, in what appears to be private land now, what they believe to be the only old Mennonite cemetery in the area.

Other unusual burial places they have found, Pettigrew said, include a cemetery in Billings, Oklahoma "with a whole bunch of headstones with the same name and that's it."

"We never could find anything else out about it."

"We found another one for the 'Lost Cowboy' in Garfield County, and there's always a bunch of beer cans on it, and everybody drinks with him," Pettigrew said. "Nobody knows who he is except that he was a lone cowboy buried in that one spot probably a long time ago."

What started as a project of mapping final resting places has turned into a massive undertaking of major importance, but something both Knight and Pettigrew laughingly agree is "really just us being nosy."

"We do it because people leave from here, and then they come home, and you hear people at a celebration or at the fair say my aunt or so-and-so was buried around certain areas, and we want people to be able to locate their people," Knight said.

"All my life I'd go with the older people, and they'd tell the most interesting stories. You just wonder where people came from, if they were in the land run or if the baby died and then the family moved away, things like that."

"We get excited about the history," Pettigrew said, who also finds the places where those who are laid to rest very peaceful.

"When I started, I went to the funeral homes and asked for maps, and they didn't have any," Knight said. "But they want one of ours when it's done."

The map of where the dead are buried is now a "living" document, as Knight and Pettigrew have already uncovered many more burial places with new details than originally documented by others.

The two have also said they will keep doing their history detective work for as long as they continue to uncover stories, people and places they find fascinating.

They both love the novel and film "Killers of the Flower Moon" and went to see some of the places mentioned in the book. They feel like they may one day discover something that leads to an entire unknown history and reveal real truth and justice, like in the book.

"I tell you what, it's something you can sure get hooked on," Pettigrew said.

Pettigrew and Knight ask that anyone who wishes to help with information to add to their project, or perhaps has questions in any of the local areas, to please reach out to them. Knight can be reached at 580-307-7155, or email Pettigrew at jjpspett@yahoo.com.