Tollebu Cemetery in Ridgeland, Wisconsin

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Get directions Ridgeland, Wisconsin, USA

Coordinates: 45.12560, -91.85530
Cemetery ID:

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About these numbers These percentages indicate the number of Find a Grave memorials that have a grave photo or GPS coordinates. We don't know the total number of burials in a cemetery, so we cannot calculate a percentage of those with memorials, photos or GPS coordinates.

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The very early pioneers of this area would gather for church worship services in their private homes. In 1885, needing a place to inter their deceased, the Tolleba Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Congregation purchased two acres of land from the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis, & Omaha Railway Company. During that time and several miles to the west, another community was also meeting in homes for worship and in 1875, they formed a congregation, naming it the Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church at Hay River, selecting at that time, a place for a church building with a cemetery. As the Tolleba congregation never constructed a church building, but the Hay River congregation did, the Tolleba congregation members joined with either Hay River or other neighboring parishes. Over the next 70 years, Tolleba's cemetery gradually fell to total neglect. In 1958, the State of Wisconsin passed an "Abandoned Cemetery" statute requiring the state's counties to assume ownership and responsibility of the abandoned cemeteries that were within their county's jurisdiction. Tolleba's cemetery was then cleared of its overgrown vegetation by the Wilson Township and reduced in size to one-half acre, to where the known burial plots existed, to allow for easier maintenance of the cemetery. In 1959, a used marble monument was purchased by the township and placed in the half-acre plot on which the discernable names, taken from the 80-year-old weathered wooden markers of those interred there, were transcribed beneath the cemetery's misspelled name of "Tollebu." A few of the names of those interred there were far too illegible to transfer onto the white marble monument and are lost forever.