Fairview Cemetery, also known as Burris Cemetery and Riverdale Cemetery, is located on the second highest hill in Sumner County near the unincorporated town of Riverdale in Seventy-Six Township. “Fairveiw” is misspelled on the cemetery sign.
The cemetery was said to have been established sometime before 1877, but the exact date isn’t known. A plaque near the cemetery entrance donated by the Wayne White family in 1998 shares a story of the cemetery’s beginnings.
“According to memoirs, a family in a covered wagon camped overnight on this hillside. Two little girls playing around a campfire were fatally burned and buried in the southeast corner of this section of land, the present site of the Fairview Cemetery, year, unknown.
“The first recorded burial was Charles M. Gross, 1877. The Fairview Cemetery Association was organized in 1879. William and Eliza Burrows donated an acre of land … William and Susan Clough sold an adjoining two acres to the association in 1904.”
Prairie fires were prevalent in this area in the 1870’s, but there are no reports of two girls being killed by a prairie fire. The names of the girls who were allegedly fatally burned and the year they died are not known.
A piece of known history missing from the plaque is the story of the large sinkhole or crater that appeared here near the end of 1961. “An unused section of the graveyard dropped almost 50 feet to create a spectacular phenomenon on one of the highest hills in Sumner County.”
An old well 150 feet away may have collapsed, causing the fifty foot wide crater.
No graves were said to be lost to the crater, but there is at least one additional cave-in today near the site of the original crater. It looks like it may be someone’s grave.
The large crater was eventually filled but it continued to slowly sink. Several graves were moved after the cave-in.
It currently holds a pile of old tree branches, hidden by native grasses that are allowed to grow there undisturbed.
Only 15 people have been buried here since the crater appeared. The last burial at Fairview Cemetery was in 1981.
I couldn’t find a reason why this cemetery was once called Burris cemetery, other than Burris is a spelling/pronunciation variation of the surname Burrows, the family who donated the first acre of land.
The Burrows Family
Census records and other documents prove that it was Benjamin, not William, who was married to Eliza. And Benjamin was the one owned this land, at least according to an 1883 map. The couple did have a son named William.
The first burial here was said to be in 1877, and there is one gravestone here with death dates of 1880. The Burrows were living in Illinois in 1880, according to the census. They may have donated that acre of their land because there were already burials there when they arrived.
There are at least nine members of the Burrows family buried here. The family suffered many losses in 1886, including father and landowner Benjamin.
Two of Benjamin and Eliza’s children are buried here with a shared gravestone. The children, Laura and Benjamin, died one day apart in January 1886.
Benjamin G., son of Benj. and E.J. Burrows, died Jan. 13, 1886, aged 3 ys, 7 ms, 18 ds
Benjamin’s brother Richard, or Uncle Dickey as he was known, lived nearby with his wife Nancy. He was on the 1880 Federal Census Schedules of Defective, Dependent, and Delinquent Classes because he was deaf, said to have been caused by lung fever. He died a week before his brother did.
His wife, known affectionately to locals as Aunt Nancy, died a little more than a year after Uncle Dickey and was buried next to him.
John Burrows was one of Benjamin’s sons with his first wife. John was a barber, and was said to have become ill after working his trade in a damp basement. He had not been in Sumner County long.
Other Burials at Fairview Cemetery
Charles Gross was the first individual buried here according to the plaque. I found a “young man by the name of Gross” who drown in 1877, but this man died about 20 miles away from Riverdale.
The first burial was probably Charlie Cross, a child whose grave marker has been lost to the ground now, but the broken stone was captured in a photograph years ago by Michael Halfman. Six-year-old Maud Hines, the second person buried here, doesn’t appear to have a gravestone either, but it may have also been lost to the earth. There are a lot of missing or destroyed gravestones here.
The oldest death dates on a visible grave marker here are for Bennie Clothier, age one, and his brother Clarence William, age two. The polish on their broken marble gravestone has nearly disappeared and many of the words are difficult to read. The brothers died days apart in 1880.
Bennie died first, then Clarence died three days later.
The boys share a gravestone with their mother Nora who died in 1881, one day after her 24th birthday.
The second oldest date on gravestone I found here is for another boy named Clarence. He was almost three months old when he died in 1881.
Isaac Guffy, or Grandfather Guffy, bought a farm here in 1884 and relocated from Iowa. He was reported to be “very low” a few days before he died in 1885.
Hamilton Strevey died suddenly in 1887 at home with his wife. It was reported that he was having chest pains and then “the messenger of death knocked at the door of his existence, and he went to try the realities of another world from whence no traveler returns.”
Samuel Grice died in 1887 after suffering for six weeks from injuries sustained from being thrown from a train. A post-mortem exam determined that “some of his ribs were torn from his spine, and his spine broken.” His family thought he was getting better, and his death was said to be a shock. “He was a good neighbor [and] a kind and affectionate father and husband.”
Cannah Edmondson only showed up on two census records. The boy was living in Illinois with his parents and four siblings in 1870. By 1880, the family (plus two more kids) were living in Seventy-Six Township. He died from malaria while attending school in Parkville, Missouri and was returned here to be buried. His gravestone says he died in 1887, but his obituary (and the Missouri death index) prove he died in 1886.
Infant Conn died on the day he was born in 1888. We’ve visited this cemetery several time and the baby’s gravestone used to be on the ground, deliberately removed from its base. On a recent visit, we saw the gravestone has been loosely reset (crooked).
The infant was the son of William and Mary Conn, who have gravestones next to him. The Conn family has the most noticeable plot because their gravestones are the tallest and most prominent here, and they are also located at highest point in the cemetery. The Conns were neighbors of Richard and Nancy Burrows.
Clarence Baird had just gotten over scarlet fever when “his little spirit departed from this earth” in 1895. Two weeks before his death, school was closed because the Baird children were suffering from the disease.
Otto Dailey must have suffered quite a bit the year he died. It was reported in January 1892 that he was being treated for “gastric catarrh and ulceration of the duodenum from which he was having large hemorrhages into the bowels.” When he died later that year, he was ready.
Jesse Rose was 19 when he drowned in a neighbor’s pond after being seized with cramps in 1903. His gravestone has been removed from its crooked base.
Additional Resources
Fairview Cemetery, Find a Grave
Historical Detective, Rural Messenger
1885 Map, Township 31, Range 1 West
Riverdale Town Company Incorporated, The Sumner County Press, Wellington, KS, Jul 7, 1887
Crater Continues to Expand in Cemetery at Riverdale, The Wichita Eagle, Wichita, KS, Dec 9, 1961
Crater Grows in Cemetery at Riverdale, The Wichita Eagle, Wichita, KS, Dec 11, 1961
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