Shoots of new winter wheat are pushing through the sandy soil of the Oklahoma panhandle a few miles south of Elkhart, KS.

But there is something else emerging from the prairie at the intersection of two dirt roads - a cemetery that has been buried for perhaps half a century.

Certainly longer than Brian Mitchell, 23, has been around.

"It was during those dirty '30's that it happened" says Velma McClung. Brian's grandmother. "It was pretty well there until then. My husband and I went out there during the dirty '30s that it happened."

"It was pretty well there until then. My husband and I went out there during the dirty '30s and some of the stones were still sticking up."

Mitchell Farms bought the land three years ago. Brian, a third generation farmer, had never seen the cemetery. But, his grandparents talked about it and he knew that under the 9-foot mound of dirt lay the remains of a cemetery established by pioneers.

Last spring, after mulling it over in a coffee shop conversation, he decided tgo do some digging.

He and his brother, Brent took a shovel to section of the blow hill where his grandfather remembered seeing a protruding post in recent years.

"it was a spur of the moment thing." Brian recalls, "I just went out there one day."

What they found was the grave of William Chandler, son of A.L. and s. Chandler, who died in the winter of 1911, six weeks before his second birthday.

The gravesite was remarkable intact. Hog, strung from four fence posts located at the corners of the plot, was still in place. Two battered cans, apparently used to hold flowers long ago, flanked the grave.

Brian decided to unearth the rest of the cemetery with something more efficient that a shovel - a tractor pulling earth-moving equipment.

One concern was damaging gravestones, or worse yet, digging into a coffin. A search for burial plot maps had proven fruitless.

His grandfather told him that once he got below the original ground level he would be able to make out the gravesites because the color of the fill dirt would not be the same as that of the vergin soul.

"I didn't belive him." he recalled. Grandfather was right. There as clear as could be, was the rectangular shape of a grave. By the end of the summer, Brian had leveled the entire site.

At the turn of the century, there just wasn't much in the southwest corner of Kansas, said Mrs. McClung. That is, until the railroad extended itss line from Dodge City in 1913, the year Elkhart was founded."

By then, Oklahoma's panhandle area sported several tiny communities. Mrs. McClung spent here earliest years in one of them. Postal, a settlement about 20 miles southeast of Elkhart that had a grocery store and a blacksmith shop.

One of the communities in Oklahoma was Cosmo, located 2 miles south and 1 1/2 miles east of Elkhart. It had a local store, church, post office and blacksmith shop.

And a cemetery, located two miles west of there.

After hours of scanning old area newspapers, Brian found several references to the cemetery. Two of the obituaries he found said the people had been buried at Cosmos, but the graves are now in Elkhart.

Brian has concluded that Mr. Hooper was a sondier in Company E of the 23rd division of the Missouri Infantry.

One obituary in the Elkhart News noted that in the spring of 1917, William Neese died at his home of pneumonia, leaving a wife and two children. The obituary doesn't say where he was buried.

But he did live near the Triumph community, and as best Brian can tell people from there were buried in Cosmos.

After he got started on the project, he got a call from an Elkhart area resident who found the headstone to Nees's grage in his pasture. Today it marks one of the anonymous graves in the Cosmos Cemetery.

Brian is not finished with this projece yet. Two area businesses have offered to supply fencing and a cemetery sign. He plans to seed the land with gras also.

In the meantime, he contues to research area to find out more about the people who were buried in the cemetery. People with information can write to him at: Brian Mitchell, P.O. Box 923, Elkhart, KS, 67950.