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Tribal Councilman JohnKetcher describes where the Sequoyah orphan's cemetery was located. In the background is the storage facility that new sits on the land.
(Photo by Will Chavez)

TAHLEQUAH, OKLAHOMA - There is no hint of a cemetery on this piece of cleared land littered with flint rock just across the four-lane highway from Sequoyah High School.

The Economy Storage facility is all that sits on the land, and part of the facility may even sit on the cemetery. It's hard to determine because so little information remains of a cemetery that was the final resting place for orphans and the handicapped who were cared for by the tribe in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

People who remember are now sharing their memories of the cemetery and how it suddenly disappeared in the late 1950s.

Following the Civil War, which divided and scarred the Cherokee Nation, there were many orphans. In 1871, the Cherokee National Council, the precursor to today's Cherokee Council, authorized funding to build an orphan asylum about four miles southwest of Tahlequah, a site that is now just off State Highway 62.

The institution's name was changed to the Sequoyah Orphan's Training School in 1925 to honor the inventor of the tribe's syllabary, and the school eventually became Sequoyah High School. Since 1985, the tribe has operated SHS through a federal grant.

Tribal Councilor John Ketcher attended the school from 1935 until 1941. He said he is angry about the desecration of the cemetery, which he remembers having 20 to 30 graves.

He recalls the cemetery being located just across the road from the school's entrance. He said he didn't realize the cemetery's headstones were gone until he returned to Tahlequah in the 1960s. He has heard stories about what happened to the cemetery.

"I've heard the headstones were thrown into a pond after they were bulldozed into a pile," Ketcher said. "Someone was mistaken 50 years ago when they thought bulldozing a cemetery and ripping its headstones from the earth would make people forget it ever existed."

Cecil Shipp of Tahlequah, who also attended the school from 1943 to 1954 and taught at the school from 1960 to 1981, recalls the cemetery being about 150 yards north of the middle gate in an overgrown area. He also remembers when the cemetery disappeared overnight.

In the late 1950s, then-school superintendent Diamond Roach allegedly used a government bulldozer to clear 30 to 40 headstones from the cemetery. Shipp said most of the headstones were made of sandstone because they were easier to etch.

He said Roach, who is now deceased, pushed the headstones into one pile, and the cemetery site was used as a training area for students who wanted to learn how to drive heavy construction equipment when Sequoyah was a vocational school. Eventually, the pile of headstones disappeared.

Not long afterwards Roach bought land a few yards north of the where the cemetery was located and had a home built there, which still stands. The land previously belonged to the school and should have remained in trust under the administration of the BIA, but it was somehow sold to an individual who in turn allegedly sold it to Roach, Ketcher said.

"We lost the land through some hocus pocus by the BIA," Ketcher said.

Former student Sadie Purnell of Tahlequah attended the school from 1924 to 1937 and remembers "a good-size cemetery."

"There was a lot of graves when I first went to school there," she said. "It was all brushy around it, but you could definitely see the graves."

Purnell recalls most of the headstones were "Indian headstones" of plain, flat, etched sandstone.

She said she remembers when a funeral was held, students would walk across a dirt road, now Highway 62, to attend the funeral.

Ketcher said he believes when Highway 62 was widened to a four-lane in the mid-1990s some of the graves may have been covered by the new road.

Purnell said in the early 1980s she began calling to tell someone about the cemetery.

"I called the Cherokee Nation when I saw heavy equipment up there one time. I thought it was a sacrilege," she said. "I gave up after my call was transferred so many times."

Recently, Ketcher has been working with the tribe's resources department to try to buy the eight acres of land from its current owner. More than once he has brought up buying the land back during the council's Resources Committee meetings, but the committee hasn't shown much interest in trying to get the land back, he said.

"The new owners are willing to sell the land, but with the money crunch the nation is in it's not a good time," he said. "I hope the future council will consider purchasing the land."

Ketcher said he believes no one was buried in the cemetery after 1925, but SHS historian Don Franklin believes orphan students were buried there after that year, including students from other tribes. Franklin, who also teaches music and video production at SHS, said before 1925 most of the students buried in the cemetery were Cherokee.

Eventually, the Department of Interior, who took over operation of the school in 1914, began shipping home the bodies of students who died at the school, Shipp said.

A stone marker, placed by the Cherokee Nation Cultural Committee, honors the orphans buried in the missing cemetery.
(Photo by Will Chavez)

Franklin also said he believes adults are buried in the cemetery because the asylum also took in the handicapped, and the asylum also served "as a place of refuge" for people until they were able to make it on their own.

Through his own research Franklin has found little information about the cemetery. There is no record of the cemetery in Cherokee County land records, he said, though it was used from approximately 1865 to the 1920s. No one seems to know when and how the cemetery was lost from the county records.

Ketcher and other former students of Sequoyah are determined not to forget the orphans and others buried in the lost cemetery. Working together with the tribe's Cultural Committee, in 1991 they placed a stone marker just north of where the cemetery is thought to be located. The marker reads in part: "Once they lived, loved and were loved. Now their remains are eternally mixed with the soil of a land they were forced to move to. They are remembered in spirit by those who care, their Cherokee brethren."

Related contact information:

Mike Miller, Cherokee Nation Director of Communications Phone: 918-456-0671 (ext.2210) Fax: 918-458-5580 E-mail: Communications@cherokee.org Larry Daugherty, Advertising Manager Cherokee Nation - Public Affairs Phone 918-456-0671 (Ex.2324) E-mail: ldaugherty@cherokee.org

Steven Swogger, Agriculture Liaison Natural Resources Department Phone: 918-456-0671 (ext.2546) FAX: 918-458-7673 E-mail: sswogger@cherokee.org Bradley D. Peak, Cherokee Nation Natural Resources Specialist Phone: 918-456-0671 (ex.2843) E-mail: bpeak@cherokee.org