The Cemetery Walk, 2005

This is an entry from an old blog of mine, Wyrd Thoughts, from June 27, 2005

The Cemetery Walk at Riverside Cemetery in Menominee went really well. We had a lot of volunteers in historic costume playing the part of different prominent historic dead people.

I lucked out, I was assigned to Potter's Field. That's where the poor folk were buried including my great-grandfather. It's also the final resting place of the McDonald Boys, two Canadian lumberjacks who got in a fight at the local cathouse in 1881 and stabbed Willie Kittson, the half-indian son of a pioneering settler, to death.

Local folk felt the McDonald boys should pay with their lives, but Michigan had already abolished the death penalty some decades earlier. So the local crowd got likkered up in Forvilly's tavern and plotted a lynching. They broke the McDonald boys out of jail and strung them up. They were buried in Potter's Field, their grave marked only with a logger's chain. Then someone stole the chain.

The Cemetery walk was not actually supposed to be a walk, there was a horse drawn wagon to take tours around. But there was a big turnout and so crowds of people decided not to wait, but walked along the tour route. And so I had to give a presentation in the Potter's Field, even though the lady who organized the event said we wouldn't have to talk, but just wave to the crowds in the wagon.

Anyway, everybody really liked my presentation once I decided to tell the story of the McDonald Boys. Most of the people in town already know the story a little, it's local folklore. One fellow said the site of the lynching was in front of his house. (I was always told it was in front of my grandmother's house.)