Saint Johns Cemetery serves Jackson, in the north of Dakota County, and it carries the town's first name.
Jackson began as St. John's, established on 2 June 1856 and platted three weeks later — fifteen months after Dakota County itself was created, and eleven years before Nebraska became a state. Father Jeremiah Trecy brought sixty people up from Iowa in eighteen ox-drawn covered wagons, most of them Irish immigrants, and the colony they founded was the first Catholic parish in Nebraska. St. John's had about two hundred inhabitants by 1858 before the Missouri began eating at the riverbank in the early 1860s. The settlement moved back from the water and became Jackson; the cemetery kept the older name.
Around 1,049 memorials have been recorded, which is a record of what has been photographed and indexed rather than a count of everyone buried there.
For burial records or plot enquiries, contact the Catholic parish at Jackson, or the Dakota County Clerk in Dakota City. Ownership can also be confirmed through the Nebraska Statewide Cemetery Registry at the State Historical Society.