Still, the area just around the cemetery is tranquil. On the eastern side of the cemetery sits a pond lined with cedar trees and red dirt banks that wind along the border of the 26-acre cemetery. The land is mostly flat, as it was in 1889, with the same wide-open skies. On a recent, windy day, a killdeer could be heard chirping out its staccato song.

Today, that land is a part of the city where development is beginning to appear. Housing additions are already standing to the east and south of the cemetery, and a new housing addition, Savannah Estates, is being built on the west side, just across the Canadian County line.

When Mamie Smith was buried at 89er Cemetery, it was just seven months after the Oklahoma Land Rush. It would be years before the Oklahoma Territory would become a part of the state of Oklahoma, and decades more before the land where the cemetery sits would become a part of Oklahoma City.

At the cemetery's entrance, a cast-iron black arch bearing its name stretches between two poles. The headstones bear names such as Eades, Enterline, Couch, Casto, Ramsey, Siler, Snode and McGubbin. In 1991, Emmerson received a letter in the mail from a relative who had traced the McGubbin family to Scotland in the 1600s, but he has not had contact with other descendants of the early Oklahoma County settlers since.

There are records of about 250 burials at the original section of the cemetery, Emmerson said, but today there are only about 160 markers remaining in original sections. Emmerson has created an electronic database with all of the information about burials over the past 60 years. But there is less known about the graves of those who died from 1889 to 1920.

Jan Beattie of Edmond, the president of the Oklahoma Home & Community Education Genealogy Group, has helped document the graves in the cemetery's northwest corner. She has helped make transcriptions, or maps of every grave at the cemetery with names, dates and locations, including the epitaphs such as "Lead Lightly Light," "Gone But Not Forgotten" and "Asleep in Jesus." The group has written books that document cemeteries in every county of the state, 77 separate books. The group is soon to publish a book about all the known cemeteries in the state.

"It's important to preserve our history, and that is what a tombstone is," Beattie said. "It is history, and it preserves the heritage of our ancestors."

There are a number of pioneer cemeteries in central Oklahoma with graves that date back to 1889, Beattie said. But headstones from the past are not always permanent, she said. They sometimes disappear, and there are many unmarked graves in older cemeteries that have to be located, she said.