Lexington Memorial Cemetery

A Methodist Episcopal church, locally known as the German Methodist Church, was organized in Lexington in 1882. The church purchased two acres of land for a cemetery in November 1898. The first recorded burials on this site were those of two-year-old Reinhold Retzlaff and four-year-old Gustav Hillegeist in the spring of 1899. Also interred here are Civil War veterans Bernhard Retzlaff (who fought for both the Union and the Confederacy), Jacob Seifert, and Gustav Urbantke, who served as a lay minister for forty years. Others buried here include members of the Bauer, Grusendorf, Hillegeist, Hornung, Letterman, Otto, Peterson, Raesener, and Raschke families. All were charter members of the church. (1999).