This Mackie family cemetery burial list was procured by Warren L. Van Dine April 25, 1971 on a visit to it accompanied by Mr. Charles Dowdall who acted as a guide and assisted in the work.
     Mr. Dowdall is a former Nauvoo grade school principal who is employed now as a bus driver for the Nauvoo - Colusa High School system.  He wrote the Appanoose Township chapter of the 1968 Hancock County Illinois history with some help by Mrs. Ida Blum in research.  He lives in Niota (sometimes called east of Fort Madison).
     Mackie family is a burying ground about 12 x 12 ft. in area.  There is a farm field fence on one side with a small cultivated field on the other side of the fence.  On the other three sides there are just posts left from of fence long gone which protected the graves of these dead and their small marble slab monuments from depredations of livestock.
     People of the neighborhood say there are seven graves here but there are only three monuments, all down on the ground.  It may be there never were any more as people of Civil War days here when these dead were brought here by grieving relatives were poor farmers. There was very little cash money circulating in this hilly farm country by the Mississippi in western Illinois in those days and the living  had barely enough income for necessities like food and none left over for luxuries like fifteen dollar monuments.
     This is broken land, a strip site, maybe 10 miles long and a couple of miles wide from Niota south to Nauvoo on the river between hard Rock Road No. 96 and river.  It was gouged out and left like this, scholars explained, by the retreating glaciers during the Ice Age.
or it may be there were but three buried here.
     This cemetery is located but a  stone's throw south of a very old red barn (the beginning to show many stages of age).  In the modest farm house close in north of the barn Mr. David Fprtado, a basketball coach of Nauvoo-Colusa High, and his wife and their small children live at this writing.

He conducted the writer of this and Mr. Dowdall to the cemetery.

     A substantial gravel road that runs north-south past the old farm on the east.  It is a farm that was owned by the Mackie family for a century or more till their sale of it to Mr. Woodrow M. Wilson about the mid-1860s, maybe longer back to the 1840's or even back to the first owner.
     Off to the south of the cemetery (the cemetery is and it) is broken pasture land, fairly level but not considered tillable.  This is about 2 mi. east of the river and almost that far back west of the No. 96 road.
     It is almost 4 miles south of  Niota and about that far above Nauvoo on the map.
     The Mackie family was never a very prominent one in the history of Hancock county.  This was a farm family, but they were very active from time to time in Appanoose township politics and life.
     Robert Mackie of this burial list was tax collector of the township in the late 1850's.  See the Gregg 1880 County history, page 954 for this.
     As late as 1921 when the Schofield 1921 County history was published one of the Mackies was constable here.
     One of the Mackies is listed on page 165 of the 1968 Hancock County history, in a statement by Mrs. Judith Gerhardt Johnson as a student in the Frenchtown rural grade school of this area.  This was in 1878 Julia Raymond was a teacher there.
     The figure of seven graves here came from Mrs. Dale (Vivian) Metternich who undoubtedly got her data about the neighborhood cemeteries from Mrs. Judith Gerhardt Johnson.  Mrs. Metternich was a Gerhardt.
     Mrs. Johnson is quoted quite a bit on matters here in the Appanoose Township chapter in the 1968 county history and she gave this figure of seven for the Mackie family cemetery it is probably correct.

Mackie, Robert- b: June 19, 1827   d: January 1, 1869
Mackie, Mary E. - b: May 9, 1853   d September 30, 1854  (d/o R. and B. Mackie)
Mackie, Agnes- b: September 1, 1855   d: August 9, 1856  (d/o R. and B. Mackie)

(These were the only names listed in this family burial ground.)