The following is taken from Cheryl McAfee's History of O'Dell Cemetery, dated 2002. The land where O'Dell cemetery is located was bought from the public lands of the United States by Artemadorus Clark, the patent is dated April 2, 1829. Ray County marriage records show that "Doris" Clark married Mary Roe on November 19, 1826. His will, dated September 16, 1838, on file in the probate records at the Ray County courthouse, decrees that "one half acre" of his land "on the top of the ridge southwest from the spring" be set aside as "a burying ground," to be "posted and railed," and "with a gate in the east square." Artemadorus Clark died shortly thereafter, as his will was admitted to probate October 2, 1838. Evidently then, Artemadorus Clark was the first to be buried in what later became known as O'Dell cemetery. In Mrs. Olive Cox's transcription of the headstones as published in Jewell Mayes' column in the Richmond Missourian" newspaper dated February 1, 1937, it states "Mrs. Roberta O'Dell, widow of the late David J. O'Dell, told Mrs. Cox that she remembers hearing the older folks say that a Doris Clark was the first one buried in the O'Dell cemetery, but there is no monument bearing that name." I think it wonderful that a piece of oral history was passed down and remembered correctly a hundred years later. The older portion of the cemetery is the eastern end, where a number of graves are marked only with fieldstones. Some of these, according to Mrs. Cox's transcription, were originally carved or painted on, but virtually none are readable today. The oldest regular headstone still decipherable is that of Nancy Hockensmith, who died in 1842. Ann Eliza Riggs' stone is the next oldest readable, with a death year of 1846. Mrs. Cox recorded the death date of Euphama Hockensmith as 1847; the carving on this stone is now virtually lost. By 1880 there were upwards of thirty-five regular headstones; there is about this same number of fieldstone markers and I'd guess the majority of them were placed in the early years of the cemetery. Although I've made a number of trips to the Ray County Courthouse and have spent hours searching the deed indexes, I've been unable to find the entries transferring ownership to the O'Dells. . . . Isaac O'Dell was the administrator of Doris Clark's will; there were several Isaac O'Dells in the community, one of who was the father of William Riley O'Dell and grandfather of George Washington O'Dell. At any rate, at his death on May 23, 1874, George Washington O'Dell was the owner of the land and it passed to his widow, Eliza Jane (Gaines) O'Dell. Eliza later married John Warriner on December 24, 1879, and in an indenture dated 18 October 1880, they deeded over to Ray County, "one acre and one half more or less, for the purpose of a public burying ground." Doris Clark founded the cemetery, but Eliza Gaines O'Dell Warriner and husband John gave it to the public.