Aspen Grove Cemetery

Aspen Grove is older than Iowa — the cemetery chartered by the territorial legislature in 1843, three years before statehood, when Burlington was still the capital. It holds the territory's dead: John Morgan, a Revolutionary War soldier who fought at Brandywine and Germantown and died in 1843; James Clark, who founded Iowa's first newspaper and served as territorial governor; John Gear, the tenth governor and a senator.

The cemetery's most consequential grave is James Wilson Grimes — Iowa's third governor and senator, the man carried into the Senate chamber on his sickbed in 1868 to cast the deciding vote that saved Andrew Johnson from removal. Five Civil War generals are buried at Aspen Grove, and three of its graves belong to something rarer — women who were freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad and went on to serve as Civil War nurses, Rachel Bundy among them. The cemetery is a Network to Freedom site — the grounds where the people who escaped slavery and then nursed the Union's soldiers are buried in the town that was the territory's first capital.

The grounds themselves are the record — 133 acres, three cemetery-design traditions, an accredited arboretum, forty thousand documented burials and at least ten thousand more the records haven't caught. Eleven people have died on the grounds — suicides, electrocutions, drownings in the lake that was later drained. The dead of Aspen Grove span the republic's whole experiment, from a soldier of 1776 to the nurses who were born in slavery.

Aspen Grove is the archive's territorial file — the cemetery older than its state, holding the Revolution's veterans and the governors who made Iowa, the freedom seekers who became nurses, and the fifty thousand dead of the Mississippi town that was the capital before Des Moines existed.