MCLEAN COUNTY ( 25News Now ) - A local historian said she thinks of one of McLean County’s oldest cemeteries as a bridge connecting people to their roots and to the settlers who founded the area.

Located just mere miles outside of Danvers, Stouts Grove Cemetery was established shortly after the founding of the Stouts Grove settlement in the 1820s, before Danvers was founded in 1836.

Cynthia Wurmnest, a former Danvers Elementary School teacher and a Stouts Grove historian in her own right, said she used the graveyard to teach her former students about local history.

“These people were remarkable,” she said. “They were people who came here with the promise of a new life. They were people who came here with everything that they had.”

Wurmnest said the cemetery’s founding and the settlem

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