A Cowboy and Rancher Resting Ground: McNeal Cemetery, Cochise County

 

As the heat has settled in for the season, and I overdid it with my wonky rotator cuff yesterday and didn't have much energy to spare this morning, we opted for a day of visiting desert cemeteries. Just up the road a piece is the McNeal Cemetery, short on shade but long on open vistas across the valley. 

This is a resting place for ranchers and cowboys and prospectors and farmers and early homesteaders, and the grave markers give testimony to the sort of rugged and capable people who are lying below. People such as veteran Captain Augustus Whiting, born in Springfield, Illinois on April 14, 1837, served in the 2nd Illinois Cavalry in the Civil War, and ended up choosing this hot, dusty, windy corner of the country as home for the last years of his life. Capt. Whiting died on November 7, 1915, leaving his widow, Mary, and several children behind.

Ida Katerina Hongo was a homesteader. Local papers carried notices about the mandatory work she was doing on her homestead here in the desert, the "proving up" process necessary to ultimately receive title to the land from the federal government. Born Ida Jaakals in Finland in 1871, she wound up in Arizona Territory with her husband, Frank, whom she divorced in 1912. McNeal apparently attracted a number of Finns to this place so unlike their homeland. Hongo (whose surname appears on various records as "Honga" and "Hanko") farmed on Central Avenue in McNeal. If you haven't been to McNeal, "Central Avenue" conjures up images of a much larger settlement than today's McNeal bears out.

Ade Waisal and Mary Nyholm were among the several Finns who settled nearby. It's always intriguing to me what a truly cosmopolitan place this county was in the 1800s and early 1900s, and to visualize the local general stores being a medley of accents and complexions from such far locales. Mary Nyholm married in Michigan in 1891 before moving south to the Arizona Territory.

Closer to home were the settlers from across the southern border, just a stone's throw away from McNeal, or those who already lived in the region before the 1854 Gadsden Purchase added this part of the state to the union. The frame and gravestone below mark the grave of the child of such residents; although obscured by shadow, the marker merely reads, "Mexican Baby 1918."

Originally from Philadelphia, Anne McCue Murphy married Frank Murphy in 1929. The following year, their daughter was born at Calumet Hospital in Douglas. The Murphys called their place "Murphy Gardens" and at parties at their home in McNeal, they decorated with tulips from their gardens. Their lovely shared headstone is capped with an iron plate depicting rose blossoms and a bit of trellis. It's easy to imagine this family happy among their flowers in this arid place. The second photo shows them in 1934.

Leo Cook and family were clearly ranchers and prospectors still here in a more recent time. Born in Carlsbad, New Mexico, Leo served in the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry in Korea (hence the tribute medal etched onto his marker), returning to Arizona to marry Jane Rae Marshall in 1954. They remained married for 57 years until Jane predeceased Leo in 2011 and left five children and a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren behind.

Fellow veteran and McNeal resident William Edwin Chafin was born in Indiana on March 25, 1888. William, described as 5'10" with dark hair and blue eyes on his draft card, served as a private with the 105 Ammo Train in World War I. After settling in Cochise County after the war, he worked as a pump man and lived on Hoggard Street, later moving to Van Dyke. When William died in 1965, he left his widow, Bertha, behind. 

Kentucky-born Robert P. Perrin served as a private on the Confederate side during the Civil War. After the war he settled on a farm in Whitewater near McNeal. He lived in Cochise County for the final 14 years of his life, passing in 1923.

One of the things I always appreciate in rural cemeteries is the presence of homemade markers, creatively commemorating the dead, and the small trinkets left behind that give a glimpse not only into the interests or abilities of the deceased but of those who buried them. From small quartz pieces carefully inlaid in adobe mud to simple wooden crosses to crosses of coiled barbed wire that seem to reach upwards in an attempted embrace, it's poignant to me to see these individualized memorials that are disallowed in contemporary urban cemeteries. Often the cemeteries mandate markers must be of flat, uniform marble or granite flush with the surface of the lawn so that lawn mowers can be easily driven across them. Here, there is no lawn, nor often any grass at all; no one mows the scruffy weeds or the persistent yucca. There's dirt, and rock, and unique memento mori lovingly placed by grieving family and friends.

Copyright (c) 2024 by Marcy J. Miller * All rights reserved * No part of this content may be reproduced without the express permission of the author * Links to this page, however, may be freely shared and are appreciated * Thanks for stopping by!