Pioneer Cemetery Restoration

Two Iowa residents preserving the state's earliest graveyards

By Gwendolyn Purdom | From Preservation | Spring 2012 

Dylan Brown-Kwaiser and Gail Brown at Skillman Cemetery.

Credit: Courtesy Gail Brown

Like most 17-year-old boys, Dylan Brown-Kwaiser is always happy to get some time behind the wheel. But unlike his joy-riding peers, the high school junior’s road trips include his grandmother in the passenger seat and a long list of historic pioneer cemeteries to explore.
“He does all the driving so I can stare out into the wilderness and see if we can find something,” says Gail Brown, Brown-Kwaiser’s grandmother and a professor in the geographic information system program at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Sometimes we just knock on doors.”
Brown and Brown-Kwaiser have documented and mapped about 1,300 gravestones in dozens of burial grounds since Brown received the Kirkwood Endowed Chair for 2011–2012 to pursue research on 19th- and early-20th-century Iowa cemeteries. The pair’s work—which involves GPS technology, photography, and detailed note taking—helps historians and preservationists piece together information about some of the state’s earliest settlers. Photos and coordinates of each headstone are turned over to the Iowa Gravestone Project, an online database operated by genealogy group IAGenWeb.