Manhattan ? Following nearly three years of excavating, researching and planning, a chapter of Manhattan’s long-forgotten history has been laid to rest.

The occasion was the reburial of 13 sets of remains that had been discovered and unearthed from the property at Meadowlark Hills Retirement Community in 2004 during planning for an expansion to its Prairie Crest Cottages. Although staff members knew there were a few headstones in the back northeast corner of the property, no one knew exactly how many bodies had been buried there or whether any were still there.

To be sure, Meadowlark officials contacted Donna C. Roper, an archeologist from Kansas State University, and asked her to put together a team to survey the site. She and 13 other archeologists from the area conducted the tedious excavation work.

“Once we started to dig, we discovered 17 graves, four of which were empty,” Roper explained.

Nearly all of the plots were unmarked, but a few held particular buttons from clothing, or pins, that aided in identifying the sex of the individuals.

Roper and her team determined that the earliest gravesite was from around 1860. The last person to be buried there was in 1900, when Dr. William Henry Stillman – a physician and the owner of the property in the late nineteenth century – was laid to rest on his own land.