When visiting, please be respectful of the neighbors and do not walk through their yard to get the the cemetery or block their driveway with your car.
This is a beautiful and deeply historic place, but it is still a cemetery. Please be respectful.
There are at least 27 interments here, but there may be more.
The sign resds as follows:
SHAWNEE INDIAN CEMETERY
[painting of old Shawneetown Methodist Church]
1840 Methodist Log Church by Charles Goslin
[photograph of Chief Joseph Parks]
The area around the cemetery was known as Gum Springs because of the many springs lined with wood from gum trees. In 1840 a Methodist church was built to the north of the cemetery. The Treaty of 1854 between the Shawnees and the United States Government set aside five acres for the cemetery and the church.
In 1854 the Shawnee council and tribal members met here to discuss the proposed treaty permitting the opening of Kansas Territory to white settlement. The town that later grew around the cemetery was named Shawnee.
Only Shawnee and their kin are buried here, many in unmarked graves. A five-foot tall gravestone marks the grave of Chief Joseph Parks, the first elected Chief of the Shawnee Tribe. The first known burial in 1837 was the six-year-old daughter of Joseph and Catherine Parks. The last known burial was Julia Ann Daughtery Bluejacket, wife of Chief Charles Bluejacket, who died July 11, 1870.
Today only a half-acre and a few gravestones survive.
Courtesy of Shawnee Mission Indian Historical Society, 2009" [end]
From the Travel Kansas website: (
visit link)
"The Shawnee Indian Cemetery is a small cemetery at the end of a short dead end street in Shawnee, Kansas. At first glance, the Shawnee Indian Cemetery appears to be an empty lot, but on inspection, a number of memorial stones are found, mostly laying down on the ground. Although the oldest remaining headstone records a death from 1837, the land was not officially set aside as a cemetery until 1854. The last known burial is Julia Ann Daugherty, wife of CHief Charles Bluejacket, who died July 11, 1870.
Burials in the Shawnee Indian Cemetery include Native Americans and individuals that were involved with the nearby Quaker and Methodist Missions. There are more graves than markers, and there are reports that headstones continued to disappear only a few years past.
The most famous person buried in Shawnee Indian Cemetery is Captain Joseph "PA-KAH-TOH-KAH-KA-LE" Parks (1794-1859), who was a hero of the Seminole War in Florida, at one time chief of all the Shawnee Indians and a major property owner in Rosedale in Kansas City, Kansas and Westport in Kansas City, Missouri, including the land on which Kelly's Westport Inn now stands. Joseph Parks was a member of the Methodist Church, a Mason, and various sources say that he was white, indian, or mixed.
In 1831, Joseph Parks was appointed as interpreter for the Shawnee Chiefs' delegation to the United States government, and he later assisted in moving the Shawnees from Ohio to the Shawnee reservation in Kansas. He then returned to Washington for several years as an agent of his tribe.
The location of the Shawnee Indian Cemetery has been a place of worship, a council house where voting was done in the very infancy of the State of Kansas, a military headquarters when Shawnee was under siege and burned twice, and a burial place. In 1840 the community's first Methodist Church was built on the ground next to the cemetery.
To visit the Shawnee Indian Cemetery take Nieman Road to 59th Terrace, turn east and drive about 100 yards to the end of the street.