Brooking Cemetery: Jackson County's Founding Judge

This quiet family cemetery holds the remains of Alvan Brooking, one of the men who shaped Jackson County in its earliest years. Born in seventeen ninety-six, Brooking served as county judge from eighteen forty-two to eighteen forty-eight, then moved to the Missouri state senate from eighteen fifty to eighteen fifty-four. The cemetery dates to the early eighteen forties, when the Kansas City area was still raw frontier.

Burials here began even before Missouri's railroad era reshaped the region. After Brooking's death in eighteen fifty-seven, the township around this site was formally named in his honor in March of eighteen seventy-two. The Raytown Historical Society placed a marker here in nineteen seventy to acknowledge what the landscape itself no longer shows: that this ground once anchored the civic heart of a community that helped build one of the great cities of the American interior.