This cemetery was first known as the Eggelston Cemetery; the property was carved out of the Eggelston Ranch, and early news articles refer to it as such. Although he was not the first to be buried there, Hubert Fonder was perhaps the most well-known tenant in its early years. Many people came to refer to it as the Fonder Cemetery. It also became the burial plot of the George McMurdo family, who were early Douglas County pioneers.  Thus, it has also been called the McMurdo Cemetery in some writings. The McMurdo family had come from Scotland in the early 1870s and settled in what became known as McMurdo Gulch. The original fence, built in the late 1880s, guarded the spot where seven members of his family lie at rest.​

 

The writings of early residents indicate that there are many more graves than were identified by the 1980 inventory taken by the Smoky Hill Chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. They only identified 13 legible gravestones. The oldest identified was that of Hubert Fonder, who died in 1871. He was the husband of Miriam Donegan Fonder, who started the Fonder School. The last known burial on the site was in 1955.

 

In 1990, a local developer owning the surrounding property rebuilt the fence around the little cemetery and in a Memorial Day ceremony, turned over the title to the cemetery to the Parker Area Historical Society. That fence eventually fell apart and it was replaced with a plastic one.

 

Information for this update came from early family and other resident writings, A Guide to Historic Sites in the Parker Area by F.B. McLaughlin, and Douglas County: A Historical Journey by Josephine Lowell Marr.

​

Information about the people buried at this cemetery can be found here.