North Prairie Cemetery
Huegely, Hoyleton Township
Washington County, Illinois

This cemetery was originally established as a church cemetery adjacent to the Emmanuel Methodist Church of North Prairie in the early 1860s. In the early years this congregation was in the North Prairie-Hoyleton Circuit, which separated from the Mascoutah Mission about 1849. In 1854 these people, who held services in their homes, belonged to the Nashville (Illinois) German Methodist Church Circuit. The Emmanuel or North Prairie Church building was built in 1863. The congregation remained with the Nashville Circuit until about 1878 when it joined the St. Louis (Missouri) German Methodist Conference. The congregation remained with the St. Louis Conference until it joined the Methodist Church of Illinois in 1925.
Church affiliation information from the 1979 Washington County Illinois History book
published by the Historical Society of Washington County, Nashville, IL - 1980.

By the 1960s the church and parsonage were torn down. The cemetery annexed the ground and expanded. The church bell was salvaged and is housed in a small structure, which sits where the original church once stood. This is an active cemetery wherein the North Prairie Methodist Cemetery Association sells grave lots and maintains the cemetery grounds. Their records do not contain any more information than what is presented here with respect to those buried here. They do, however, maintain a record of lot owners.

The gravestones in the old original section of the cemetery, Northwest of the Bell Monument, do not always line up perfectly with the newer stones. Despite this we have assigned row and grave numbers to each existing stone to aid in locating an ancestor's grave. For this purpose each row begins with Grave one at the North end of the cemetery with Row one in the Northeast corner of the cemetery where North Prairie and Pin Oak Roads intersect. We have allotted grave numbers to non-marked graves as well. Some rows have very few or no markers at all such as Rows 19 and 21.

Not all the information contained in this listing is actually on the individual stones. We gratefully acknowledge Ms. Wanda (Brink) Gines, Mr. Bertram Dueker and Mr. Morris G. Huck for their contributions of valuable data such as maiden names to this reading. We also wish to thank Pacey Funeral Home of Centralia, Illinois for their information concerning some unmarked graves.