reached capacity; that year, the city closed it to new burials. Over the next several years, some 7,000 remains were dug up and taken elsewhere. In 1928 the city of Minneapolis assumed responsibility for maintaining the cemetery. The city owns the physical structures (fence, flagpole, caretaker's cottage, etc.) and approximately 5,000 empty graves. The occupied graves remain the property of the families of the deceased. Burials The "Pioneers" part of the name is more apt than "Soldiers". There are only about 190 identified veterans in the cemetery: one from World War I, four from the War of 1812, 21 from the Spanish–American War, the rest from the Civil War. About 25 are clustered in a small military plot, the rest scattered. Civil War veteran Oscar Vaughn (16th United States Colored Infantry) is one of many, perhaps hundreds, of African Americans buried at Pioneers and Soldiers. Almost all the cemetery's remains belong to early residents of Minneapolis, many of them immigrants of humble means. Some headstones are carved in Swedish and German. A striking feature of the cemetery is the absence of large monuments; only a relative handful stand as high as . Many headstones are tilted, missing, or broken, and some have been crudely patched together. The headstones of old cemeteries often hint at sad stories—epidemics, industrial accidents, child mortality. Such stories are hard to find at Pioneers and Soldiers because so few markers can be read; most are marble, effaced long ago by time and the elements. In 2003 Susan Hunter Weir published a history of the cemetery in Hennepin History magazine, based in part on its paper records. She uncovered many touching stories: August Smith and Ole Shay, workers killed in the Washburn A Mill explosion of 1878; Harry T. Hayward, hanged for the 1894 murder-for-hire of Kitty Ging; 25 infants from the Cody Hospital, a so-called "baby farm", who died there in 1908 and 1909. Weir also compiled some compelling statistics. Over half of the graves belong to children under the age of ten. A majority of all the burials resulted from communicable diseases that rarely kill people in the 21st century. Some 800 died from accidents (more than a hundred in railroad accidents) or homicide, and another 150 by their own hands. The cemetery silently testifies: life in Minneapolis was shorter, harder, and more uncertain a century and more ago. Recent history The last known burial