Sedalia golfers play around graves

SEDALIA, Mo. -- The tees aren't far from the tombstones at Sedalia Country Club, where the 18-hole golf course surrounds a small graveyard dating to before the Civil War.

"We don't know if any old golfers are there," said one frequent player, Bob Rinehart, 60. "But a few of us figure our golf games belong there."

Course regulars such as Rinehart say they scarcely notice the 60-foot-by-30-foot cemetery, which, although surrounded by a white picket fence, is still considered in the rough between the 10th, 11th and 18th fairways.

Players strolling through the cemetery gate after a wayward ball are stepping into Missouri history.

The cemetery is the final resting place for some of Pettis County's oldest family names. At least 23 people, 11 of them children, were buried there between 1859 and 1921, according to sketchy records and chunks of stone markers that course superintendent Dallas Baldwin has pieced together like jigsaw puzzles.

It's known as Shobe-Jamison-Quisenberry Cemetery. All of those names appear on the markers, which are worn from weather and years of neglect. Records indicate the oldest deceased were settlers born in Kentucky. Many moved to Missouri before the Civil War, before Jesse James began robbing banks and trains, before Mark Twain was born.

A Christian church once stood on the site, and worshippers built the cemetery. The church membership faded, the structure was abandoned and the cemetery largely forgotten.

Private investors built a golf course on the large cleared area in the late 1960s. Sedalia Country Club acquired the land when it relocated after a 1977 tornado. Baldwin, who has worked for the club most of that time, recalls the cemetery at the time being overgrown with brush and weeds, with shards of grave markers laying in piles.

A club member donated money to build the picket fence, and Baldwin has kept the plots as manicured as his fairways. He has mended the markers and their bases with concrete and put them as close to their original locations as he can surmise. He planted rose bushes at the entrance gate.

"You want a golf course to look like a nice green park. I suppose it's the same for a cemetery. We just felt it was important to make it pretty, in memory of those folks buried there, whoever they were," Baldwin said.

A few clues about the cemetery emerged after Wayne Van Natta of Olathe, Kan., literally happened upon his ancestors' burial sites while doing genealogical research. He found pieces of a marker for his great-great-great-grandfather, Abel Shobe, who was born in December 1807 and died in November 1860.

"Abel was born in Bowling Green, Ky., and his father was born in Virginia, and his father came to America from Switzerland," Van Natta said in a telephone interview. "It was just a historical fishing expedition that took me to the old cemetery just as a fluke, and I hit pay dirt."

Van Natta said he is delighted about the care given to the old cemetery by Baldwin and by the respect that golfers show -- even if many don't think about the history behind the location as their carts roll past.

Jeff Bollig, spokesman for the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, said course developers have occasionally come across abandoned burial grounds.

"But it's really unusual for you to have to play around the cemetery to complete your game," he said.

At Fort Eustis, Va., the Army post's golf course was built decades ago over a Confederate militia cemetery. In Columbia, S.C., a municipal course was redesigned after developers found it was the site of more than 1,000 graves of black mental health patients buried through the early 20th century.

And at Canton, S.D., a golf course was built over a cemetery of the Hiawatha Insane Asylum, which closed in 1934. There is a small fenced plot between the fourth and fifth fairways, a memorial to 121 Native Americans who died at the asylum.

There are other "really strange stories" about golf courses, Bollig said, such as one in rural Iowa where an airport runway bisects two fairways. "The cropdusters always circle low once to let golfers know they're about to land," he said.

Norman Griswold, 65, who kept playing through drizzle and spurts of sleet in Sedalia, said the cemetery encircled by the golf course was "not such a bad fit."

"Golf courses and cemeteries are peaceful, quiet and tranquil places," he said, "especially when my game is going well."