South Lead Cemetery Tour brochure

The History of the South Lead Cemetery: "The South Lead Cemetery is a monument not only to the many individuals who found their final resting place here, but also to the ethnic diversity, frontier spirit, and mining history of Lead itself. Here you will find 3,900 people buried under 2,200 monuments. This cemetery can claim, along with West Lead, to be the community's earliest cemetery. Before it was the 'South Lead Cemetery', this space housed the Catholic and Protestant cemeteries that would later be combined into a single, nonsectarian burial place. The South Lead Cemetery became the preferred burial place for the city's blue collar, immigrant families. You will find as you walk through these graves their occupants came from places such as Italy, Cornwall, Austria, Germany, Croatia, Lithuania, Sweden, Finland, Montenegro, Poland, Greece, Ireland, and Switzerland. Highlighting this fact, all of the graves highlighted in this tour are of people born in other parts of the world. Beyond the great ethnic diversity that went into the fabric of communal life in Lead, you will notice that frontier and mining life was hardly easy. In addition to the many graves for infants and children, a quick calculation from birth and death dates reveals a number of people who died in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Some of these deaths were the result of the danger inherent in mining, as the South Lead Cemetery is the final resting place for 158 people who died as the result of accidents related to work in the mine. Many others, though, died as a result of sickness. Pneumonia was a common cause of death and anecdotal reports claim that not infrequently someone would die within three days of showing symptoms. There are also several deaths from the flu during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (Spanish Flu). At the same time, life in early Lead was not all suffering and tragedy: You will also find many graves of those who lived into ripe old age, dying of natural causes and remembered not for how they died but for how they lived and contributed to the community. In the end - and, what is a cemetery if not a reminder of the end - to spend time with these immigrants, homemakers, mountain men, miners, business leaders, and politicians is to open a window into the character of Lead itself." Project funding was provided in part by a Historic Preservation Fund grant to the South Dakota State Historic Preservation Office, South Dakota State Historical Society, administered by the State, Tribal, Local Plans and Grants division, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior (grant number P19AF00014).

South Lead Cemetery Tour brochure

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