A decade ago, Barbara Myers, a Wichita State graduate student and administrative specialist in the Department of Art, Design and Creative Industries, founded Friends of the Wichita Pioneers. The nonprofit organization cleans and cares for grave sites at Highland Cemetery. 

Myers works full-time for the university and said that the organization is another full-time job on top of that. 

“It’s a juggle,” she said. “I really like working at the university because it gives me the time to run to anthropology (class) or go out to the cemetery … it’s been very good, but it’s hard to leave here, go home and then work another full-time job.”

The idea for Friends of the Wichita Pioneers came from Myers’ love of history and a graduate school thesis project.

“I originally decided to do this because I was going to be studying history,” Myers said. “One of the projects I was working on in a class before that was to find people from Wichita’s history, and of course, where are they all buried? Highland Cemetery.” 

Once Myers arrived at the cemetery, she realized how far into disarray it had fallen and decided she wanted to restore it. 

“I found out who owned it, which was the city, got ahold of the city, and I said, ‘Can we do some work?’ and they said ‘You would have to have a non-profit, you would have to get permission from the (grave) owners, which is the families.’” 

After that conversation, the first thing she did was go through the process of creating her nonprofit: getting incorporated with the state, registering as a 501c3 and getting insurance, which she said took her around a year. 

“It’s absolutely worth it once we can get ahold of people and say ‘We’re researching your great great grandparents and we’d like to know more about them, can you tell us?’” Myers said. “We found people all over the country that really didn’t even know they had family here, so that’s been really nice.” 

Volunteer-created, volunteer-led

Volunteers run the entire organization, and they charge nothing to give families information about their ancestors. They accept donations, fundraise and seek grants to raise money for the cleaning supplies and some of the tools.

Dalton Sanders has been working with Myers since the organization started, when they met in a class they took with WSU history professor Jay Price. 

“I don’t know the singular event that got involved,” Sanders said. “It’s my volunteering thing, I like having one thing that (is) something to volunteer for, and that’s my thing. (It) helps me get back to the community in my own way, where I feel like I’m useful and value is added.” 

Sanders said that the nonprofit is always looking to add more volunteers, and they can be found on Facebook or on their website. 

National and local celebrities 

Myers said that her favorite discovery of a family tie to Wichita has been Sandra Day O’Connor’s family. Sandra Day O’Connor was the first woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, nominated by Ronald Reagan.

“Sandra Day O’Connor’s great-grandmother was from here, and they were only here for a couple of years,” she said. “She’s the only one here of the family; the rest of them moved on to where they are now. But when I got ahold of them … they had no idea.

“There’s a few (other) celebrities, people from Wichita’s history, who maybe the name means more if you’re from Wichita.” 

New tools and projects

Sanders has a history and engineering background, which he said has been helpful in designing tools to assist the group. 

“I designed our tripod that we use to lift stones out of the ground … or if they’ve fallen over, we use the tripod as well to put the stone on top of its base,” he said. 

The organization is starting a new, smaller project within Highland, researching people who died in the 1930s and ‘40s for the county. 

“They had very small markers that just had their initials and a number, and so there’s no family, they were just buried,” Myers said. “A lot of the stones have settled under the ground, and so some of them may be a foot below the ground now, so we’re going to bring those back up so that they’re still going to be respected like everyone else.

“Those are the ones that mean the most to me, the ones that you know probably didn’t have family, but they still deserve (respect).” 

‘People who deserve it’ 

Myers said the passion that goes into her organization’s work comes from the need to treat people with respect. 

“It’s bringing relevance and respect to people who deserve it, just like everyone else,” she said. “I am a historian (but) I never said 10 years ago, ‘I want to be a cemetery historian,’ but seeing how some of them are taken care of so badly through the course of grad school, the project I ended up doing for my thesis was finding segregated cemeteries in Kansas.” 

During that project, Myers said she found about 85 segregated cemeteries. 

“Seeing those people get the respect that they weren’t given at the time means a lot to me,” she said.