Rochester Cemetery is not just an active cemetery. It’s a remnant of a once-common sight in Iowa, the place where tallgrass prairie and woodland meet. Faded, crumbling headstones dot its 13 hilly acres. The biggest oaks I’ve seen in my life — gnarled, centuries-old red, black, burr and white — tower over them, keeping watch. And otherwise engulfing the stones is a sea of prairie grasses: big bluestem, Indiangrass, switchgrass. On the right spring day, there are more blooming shooting stars here — with their delicate pink downturned heads nodding in the breeze — than may exist anywhere else in the state.
The cemetery itself dates to the 1830s, just after the Black Hawk Purchase added Iowa to the Union. But today, Rochester is special because it contains one of the rarest ecosystems in the world: oak savanna. Under a few massive trees, prairie plants sequester carbon, prevent erosion and provide key habitat for endangered wildlife like Monarch butterflies and rusty-patched bumblebees — ecosystem services desperately needed across the Midwest.
Before European settlement, tallgrass prairie covered 80% of Iowa. What remains serves as critical seed banks and blueprints for future restorations. But the continued existence of remnants like Rochester is tenuous in this land where corn is king, and it depends on the stewardship of individuals with very different ideas about what and who the land is for — and how it should be managed.
I arrived at the cemetery on a warm Sunday last May. Jacie Thomsen, a Rochester native, greeted me at the gate in a faded U.S. Army T-shirt. A township trustee and the cemetery’s burial manager, Thomsen carried a binder of old documents in one hand and a long metal rod in the other that she periodically used to probe for forgotten, buried gravestones.
“A lot of people tend to say we’re disrespecting our dead,” Thomsen told me. “I always tell people, ‘Take what you think you know about cemeteries and leave it in your car, because it does not, will not, apply here.’”
I think of the postage-stamp perfect square cemetery I grew up visiting on Memorial Day in nearby Wapello, Iowa, with its close-cropped turfgrass, ornamental bushes and stones in lines straight as the corn rows that box them in on all sides. With manicured lawns and trimmed trees as the blueprint for cemeteries, I can see why some less well acquainted with prairie plants — including other township trustees here — complain this place looks “overgrown” with weeds and in need of a good mow. But at the same time, it strikes me that if one of the pioneers buried here suddenly rose from the dead, these hills are about the only part of the Iowa landscape they’d recognize.