Located on a hill and looking east toward the Teton Mountain Range in the Hugginsville and Greentimber area is the Schults Cemetery.

In a beautiful frame of timber and mountains that displays the inspiration for its name, the early settlers began arriving in 1898 to the Greentimber area. Fred and Henry Kramer were among the first to take up homesteads. In passing through the vicinity to his work in Yellowstone Park, Fred Kramer had been much impressed with the country and persuaded his father to move here from Nebraska. They came into the region by way of Jackson Hole and were the first to take a wagon over Teton Pass, an almost impossible feat that required several days. They had to cut down tree and build the road as they went, then let the wagon down cliffs and steep hillsides with ropes once they were over the summit, for until then there had been only steep cattle trail across the pass.

The Gottfried Reinman family arrived from Nebraska in April 1901, to make their home at Greentimber. Mrs. Reinman and her six children came by train as far as the rail terminal at St. Anthony. Her brother Fred Kramer met them there with a team and wagon. Meanwhile her husband traveled by wagon train with his farm equipment and 14 head of horses and arrived in June of the same year. The first school and church conducted by a young visiting Lutheran minister has held in the Reinman home shortly after that.

The Greentimber settlers filed for water in 1904 and had it flowing in their Yellowstone Canal by 1908. Lou Mower was the surveyor and the construction company of Clinton and Hurt built the canal guaranteeing to put water on the land for $20 an acre. The directors of the canal in the beginning include Otto Stegelmeir, Otto Hargreve, Gottfried Reinman and Fred Kramer while Henry Reinman was one of the first water masters.

The land around Greentimber was taken up quickly and the overflow of settlers extended to Warm River where a school was erected for Howell, Green, Reinman and other children. In 1909, there was much travel by the way of the Greentimber road into the Yellowstone Park for the Bechler Ranger Station was built that summer. The material hauled from Marysville and the buildings erected by soldiers stationed in the Park. Some of the lumber came from the sawmill on Boone Creek that was operated by the same Pete Wilson that owned a store in Ashton.

For stock feed, the settlers used to cut the wild hay in Squirrel Meadows. On occasion as many as 14 teams would be hauling hay from there. All over the Upper Snake River Valley that spread out from Ashton the grass grew high and green towering over the sage brush and almost as high as the fire stunted quaking aspen. The prairie like land was burned over nearly every summer by fires set by lightning so that the brush and trees were held back in their growth while the grew belly high to a horse.

Elk, deer and antelope were plentiful and the buffalo wallows showed they had not been long gone. In fact, the self-taught veterinarian and taxidermist, Fred Rising, who called himself a buffalo hunter and an old timer in the region when the first settlers arrived, was said to know where the vanish buffalo could still be found. On one occasion, he was suspected of poaching Park buffalo for their fabulously valuable robes and was pursued into a saloon in Ashton by the military police of Yellowstone Park. He escaped by rushing out the back door then coming in the front door again where he sat down leisurely, pulled his hat over his eyes and pretended to be asleep.
By Margaret Hawkes Lindsley.

Located six miles east of Ashton and directly east of the Hugginsville Corner on the Atchley Farm is the Schults Cemetery. The sign, located on the south side of the Cemetery, is south of the Greentimber community.

In his book, The Soul of the Land, author Chan Atchley tells how the Schults Cemetery was created in 1905. Robert Crawford at age seventeen, died during a raging Idaho blizzard that continued for days. The blizzard made it impossible for Robert’s family to make the six-mile trip west to the Ashton Cemetery and so his body was placed in the woodshed, where it quickly froze. Robert’s father approached his neighbor, Davey Schults, requesting that he consider making the wind swept hill to the southeast of his cabin a cemetery so that the family could give Robert a proper burial. The request was granted.

David Schults relocated the body of his deceased baby daughter, Dora, who had been buried behind the Schults’ cabin, to a new grave some thirty feet east of the Crawford family plot. Six years later, Robert’s mother, Sarah Crawford, was buried next to her son, thus making them the first three people to be buried in the Cemetery that looks toward the Teton Mountain Range in the Upper Snake River Valley of southeastern Idaho. Mr. Atchley writes that Mr. Crawford sold his farm moved to California to be near his daughter and her family. Each Memorial Day, he would return to the cemetery to place flowers on the grave of his wife and son. It was Mr. Crawford’s wishes that he be buried next to his family, but the request was never granted.

The tall Crawford headstone is to the left of the signpost.

View of Tetons from Schults Cemetery