The "seed was planted" for this book in the fall of 1991, when I went by the church and Sandy Smith told me of a man who had come to the church wishing to identify his grandfather's grave in the cemetery, and place a marker. However, they were unable to find it.

    There are a lot of unidentified graves "inside the driveway" and we may never know to whom some belong. (The earliest marked grave is that of Mark Gillespie, who died 5 October 1861,  less than six months after the start of the Civil War.

    More than one person has told me a story of a cabin on the hill which caught fire, taking the lives of a whole family. They were simply buried in the yard, as was the custom then. Others have mentioned slaves being buried there, too.

    There is no way to prove such things as the fire, but the "missing" grandfather's grave continued to bother me. The man's father had made a point to bring him to the cemetery when he was a child and show him the grave. I wondered if perhaps there were others whose graves were there, but whose names somehow missed being recorded.

    Well into my research, I learned that the cemetery only became the Brainerd Methodist Cemetery in the 1950's, when the church took over the maintenance of it. Before that, it was a public cemetery, open to any and all. I found 20 persons whose graves are there, whose names are not.

    It is my hope that the data compiled here will help to preserve the history of Brainerd, both the church and the area, and send Brainerd United Methodist Church eagerly forward into its second century.