Bluff Spring Cemetery was also known as "Bushy Knob" because it was covered with brush when the early pioneers came to Johnson County. They settled along the small streams, for the double purpose of building log cabins and making rails to improve the farms which seemed to be the most practical thing to do since many of them came from timbered states. Principally for this reason the site of Kingsville was not the place for the first settlement in this general region; Bluff Springs, a little way northwest, was settled by Judge Anderson Smith prior to 1836. In that year, he sold his holdings to Benjamin Longacre. Mr. Longacre soon built a tanning yard and furnished dressed skins and hair to the settlers within a fifty mile area. Later he built a grist mill. The village was situated on a high, rolling prairie on the ridge dividing the Osage and Missouri water sheds. (It is written in section 25.) A public road from Warrensburg to Bluff Spring at that time was the only road leading to Warrensburg. Bluff Spring Cemetery is also an old burial ground and was laid out by Benjamin Longacre in 1873. Virtually all evidence of Benjamin Longacre's industries on Bluff Spring Knob have long since disappeared. One of his accomplishments does remain, however, in the 1837 Bluff Spring Cemetery. An ordinance passed in 1885 by the Board of Trustees of the Village of Kingsville established a Board of Overseers for Bluff Spring Cemetery.
