The Huron Cemetery — known to the Wyandot people as the Wyandot National Burying Ground and long called the Huron Indian Cemetery — is a 2.5-acre burial ground occupying a hilltop block in downtown kansas-city-kansas, at North 7th Street Trafficway and Minnesota Avenue. It was established around 1843, immediately after the Wyandot Nation’s forced removal from Ohio, when epidemic disease killed scores of new arrivals. For more than a century the site was the object of repeated attempts to sell it for commercial development, most famously resisted by the Conley sisters — Lyda, Helena, and Ida — who occupied the grounds in an improvised shack they called “Fort Conley.” Lyda Conley’s appeal in Conley v. Ballinger (1910) made her the first Native American woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and designated a National Historic Landmark in December 2016.

Removal and origin (1843)

The Wyandot — called Huron by French colonists, a name that attached itself to the cemetery and to the surrounding city block — were removed from their remaining lands in Ohio under federal Indian removal policy, traveling to the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers in late July 1843.1 Roughly 664 tribal members made the journey.1

The party camped in the river bottoms, where disease moved quickly through the encampment. Accounts differ on the illness — typhoid, measles, and cholera all appear in the record — but between 60 and 100 people died within months of arrival, and the low, flood-prone ground could not be used for burial.23 The Wyandot chose the highest ridge in the area, on land obtained from the Delaware, and interred their dead there; a second epidemic in 1844 added more than a hundred additional burials.42 Estimates of the total number of graves range from roughly 400 to 800, most of them unmarked.1 Members of prominent Wyandot families — Armstrong, Barnett, Clark, Hicks, and Zane among them — are buried on the site.1

Standard accounts tie the founding burials to the 1843–1844 epidemics rather than to a distinct wave of cholera deaths in the 1850s; a separate 1850s cholera episode at this site is.

The fight against sale (1906–1918)

The Wyandot Nation divided in the 1850s and again after removal to Oklahoma, and by the early twentieth century the cemetery block — by then surrounded by the growing downtown of kansas-city-kansas — was extremely valuable real estate. In 1906 Congress inserted a clause authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to sell the burying ground and relocate the remains; the measure was promoted by local businessman William Elsey Connelley on behalf of the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma.4

Three sisters of Wyandot descent — Eliza “Lyda” Burton Conley, Helena (Lena) Conley, and Ida Conley, whose own parents were buried on the grounds — responded by taking physical possession of the site. In the summer of 1906 they padlocked the gate, posted trespassing warnings, and built a roughly six-by-eight-foot shack inside the cemetery that they named Fort Conley, keeping watch there and displaying their father’s shotgun.45 The shotgun is held by the Wyandotte County Historical Museum.5

Conley v. Ballinger (1910)

Lyda Conley had earned a law degree from the Kansas City College of Law and was admitted to the bar in 1902.4 She filed for an injunction against the sale in 1907, lost below, and carried the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing it herself.4 In doing so she became the first Native American woman to argue before the Court.24

The Court decided against her in Conley v. Ballinger, 216 U.S. 84, in an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., holding that whatever rights existed in the cemetery were tribal rather than individual and that Conley therefore lacked the standing to sue, and that the United States retained sovereign power over the land notwithstanding the reservation language of the 1855 treaty.6 The federal government’s later National Historic Landmark documentation credits Conley as “the first attorney to raise the legal argument that American Indian burying grounds are entitled to protection by the Federal Government.”7

The legal loss did not end the campaign. Publicity from the case drew support from women’s clubs and civic organizations, and Kansas Senator Charles Curtis — himself of Kaw descent — championed repeal of the 1906 sale authorization; Congress appropriated restoration funds in 1916, and the city committed to preserving the grounds in 1918.42 Lyda Conley died in 1946 and is buried in the cemetery alongside her sisters and parents.25

Designations and status today

The Huron Cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 3, 1971.1 On December 23, 2016 the U.S. Department of the Interior designated it a National Historic Landmark under the name Wyandotte National Burying Ground, Eliza Burton Conley Burial Site, one of 24 landmarks announced in that round; the designation cites the site as “tangible evidence of the consequences of federal American Indian removal policy to a tribal population and its identity during the nineteenth century.”7

Additional protection came from the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, which requires descendant consent for decisions affecting the burials.1 In 1998 the federally recognized Wyandotte Nation and the Wyandot Nation of Kansas reached an agreement restricting use of the grounds to “religious, cultural or other compatible sacred activities,” ending the long threat of commercial redevelopment.1

The cemetery survives as an open, tree-shaded block in the middle of downtown Kansas City, Kansas, surrounded by office and government buildings, with hundreds of graves — many unmarked — and interpretive markers on site.25 It remains an active sacred site for the Wyandot.2

Significance to Kansas City

The Huron Cemetery is the oldest continuously identifiable burial ground in the urban core of wyandotte-county and the physical anchor of the Wyandot presence that gave the county, the city, and the wyandot-nation name itself their origin. It is also one of the few places in the metro where a nineteenth-century removal, a landmark Supreme Court case, and a still-living tribal claim occupy the same two and a half acres. Its survival — against a century of pressure from downtown land values — is largely attributable to three women who refused to leave it.

Sources

Footnotes

  1. Wikipedia — “Huron Cemetery.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  2. KCUR / Central Standard — “The Story Behind The Historic American Indian Cemetery In Downtown KCK” (2014-10-29) ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  3. Clio — “Wyandot National Burying Ground (Huron Indian Cemetery).” ↩

  4. Wyandot Nation of Kansas — “The Conley Sisters and The Wyandot National Burying Ground.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  5. KSHB 41 — “Lyda Conley’s battle for Huron Indian Cemetery in KCK.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. FindLaw — Conley v. Ballinger, 216 U.S. 84 (1910) ↩

  7. U.S. Department of the Interior — “Interior Department Announces 24 New National Historic Landmarks” (2017-01-11) ↩ ↩2

See also

Categories
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  • Building
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  • Native American

On the record — ks.city/wiki/buildings/huron-cemetery · last revised 2026-08-13