The Celestials

Lone Fir Cemetery
In Oregon’s formative years when she was learning to fly with her own wings, some surprising groups of people helped shape the future. In their day they were significantly important and often times made up a considerable portion of the population. Take the fur trappers, for instance. Instead of being rough and tumble mountain men from Appalachia, or wherever, they were more likely to have been mixed Indian/Euroamerican people known as Métis; and if not them, then East Coast Indians. Even more unlikely is that a third of the trappers were Hawaiian. Trapping crews were most often shipped west around the Horn, which required (in sailing days) a swing past Hawaii if one wanted to reach North America. It was closer and cheaper to fill up ones crew with Hawaiians than to drag people from the East Coast. Exactly how those Hawaiians accommodated themselves to snow-bound Cascade winters is unknown. There are still Métis around who remember their role in settling the territory, but I’ve never met a Hawaiian who knows anything about the trappers. They simply disappeared.

The Chinese, on the other hand, played an enormous role in civilizing the West, and they haven’t disappeared. Even though many of the early arrivals have. They disappeared, not because they were forgotten or laid in unmarked graves, but rather because the Chinese government paid to have their bodies exhumed and returned to China—men only, thank you. Apparently this process was repeated several times at twenty-year intervals.

The Chinese were particularly active in mining camps, not merely as cooks and launderers, as the movies imply, but as the miners themselves. At times, for example, a third of the miners in Canyon City were Chinese; while in Golden, Oregon, when the entire town packed up for a new strike, their places were filled with Chinese who only had to give the claims back when the whites later returned because the new strike didn’t pan out. At times, Chinese were eliminated with “extreme prejudice,” as it were.

Yet nobody else wanted their people back. The Finns never sent to bring their children home from Astoria. Missouri never called for the return of her sons and daughters gone on the Oregon Trail. The English never brought their ex-pats back to Camelot. Only the Chinese.

Chinese Cemetery - Baker City, OR
That this happened in Portland has been news for some time, and there are plans afoot to memorialize those Chinese, as well as the women and children who were left behind. And that it happened in Baker City is well known because the historic Chinese cemetery in that city is bolted next to the freeway and marked by a sign board; a small pagoda; and a tiny, stone one-room prayer house with a tin roof. Aside from those amenities, what’s most noticeable are the holes pockmarking the surrounding. Whoever did the exhumation forgot to fill them in.

What’s surprising is how extensive the exhumation practice was. Besides Baker City and Portland, it happened in Astoria, Coos Bay, Albany, Ontario, Ashland, Corvallis, Roseburg, Pendleton, and The Dalles. Whatever else, that can’t have been cheap; even if you used Chinese labor.

Visions of Lone Fir

Kay and I were among the last people to secure plots in Lone Fir Cemetery. If we’ve discombobulated our lives, at least we got death right.

Thanks to an intersection of forces and interests, Lone Fir is returning to what cemeteries were supposed to be about in the first place: edification and entertainment. When cemeteries were first proposed in the early 19th century, the idea was that glorious monuments in a park-like setting would induce people to high-minded civic behavior. And for a time, cemeteries did just that: they enticed people out of the cities to stroll through the trees and monuments to, if not always civic leaders, at least rich people. They were known as “garden cemeteries” or “rural cemeteries,” on account of their being plotted far into the countryside (long since engulfed by urban growth everywhere). They were so popular that towns like Portland and Eugene built streetcar lines specifically for them. They were so popular, in fact, that towns eventually began building cemeteries without any bodies in them, at all. They called them “parks.”

What an idea! And as the park movement spread, people forgot that they were supposed to go out to the cemetery for a good time. Indeed, in early New England, cemeteries were often the only place in town big enough to hold all the living people, forget about the dead ones. Cemeteries tried to recoup by making their new cemeteries look like the new parks: big expanses of flat lawn, only they didn’t encourage picnicking or frisbee. They succeeded in making them look like parks, but they killed off the reason for visiting them: what’s to see?


In the meantime, many traditional, now urban cemeteries languished from neglect and vandalism. Lone Fir was lucky: it didn’t languish. It held on as neighborhoods grew around it and the city pushed miles beyond. The lone fir was joined by a veritable arboretum, which now sports its own guide. It was lucky in that it held enough quirks and oddities, beginning with the almost life-size relief carvings of the founding couple, to keep up a continual flow of traffic. True, the war memorial lost its statue, half the heritage roses in the rose garden had disappeared, the mausoleums were crumbling, but still it hung on in the hearts of Portlanders. Maybe it languished a little.

It was the hearts of Portland, though, that spurred the revival. Lone Fir is back and it’s better than ever, thanks to the citizens of this town who have an inordinate love of the burg going beyond all reason. They admit that there are other nice cities in the world, ones dripping with sophistication—Paris, say—but, ah, they sigh, they aren’t Portland. Which, no matter how you look at it, is true. I can guarantee you, Paris is not Portland. Nor the other way around. But the first force to resurrect Lone Fir was the general citizenry of the community. Portlanders simply like the place and are willing to put their wallets where their hearts are.


One way that manifested itself was by the formation of an advocacy group, the Friends of Lone Fir, which has taken a vigorous lead in preserving and promoting the civic space. They are the people who have put on the shows, lead the tours, and personally gotten out there and spruced up the place. Without their active and watchful eye, perhaps none of this might have been accomplished. What’s truly amazing is that they aren’t a group of octogenarians keeping watch over their future home; they’re young people (okay, okay, there are some elder statespeople there) who have already caught the Lone Fir fever. There are seriously delirious people in that group. Portland is blessed by being a magnet, not only for young people, but a magnet for a particular class of young people: the I-can-do-that creative kind. Not only have they crept into the Friends of Lone Fir, but they’ve tapped community creativity to, among other things, produce a CD of songs written specifically for the cemetery by a bevy of local musicians (not to mention a comic book). And we have seriously delirious local musicians here, as well, as you might imagine. Lone Fir was lucky in being born in what was to become at the turn of the 21st century the locus of Portland’s youth infestation, the Eastside.


A Lone Fir quirk that particularly delights Eastside denizens and which has provided a impetus for the cemetery’s reemergence is the popularity of an historical vignette, concerning one Dr. Hawthorne, who is buried there, along with many of his patients. It’s helpful to know that Hawthorne Ave., not too far from Lone Fir, was the epicenter for the gentrification of the entire Eastside and which has now engulfed the entire city. This was where the hip, young kids moved to after the Alphabet Blocks got priced out from underneath them. Hawthorne was, and still emotionally is, their street.

But that’s just the half of it. The other half is that Hawthorne Ave. used to be named Asylum Ave. after an insane asylum at its eastern terminus. The good doctor was the head of that asylum and his patients were buried in unmarked graves along with him. It’s just the sort of story that young goths would like. How could they not love Lone Fir?


Not all the unknowns were asylum inmates, though. They were joined by transfers from earlier, more centrally located cemeteries and by scores of Chinese. The local Chinese community has provided the second big push to renovate the cemetery, even though most of the Chinese remains have long since been returned to China, at their behest. What China didn’t behest were the bones of the women and children; they weren’t important and could be left bereft in foreign soil. It is the modern, local Chinese community (in the form of the Chinese Benevolent Association), whose sensibilities have grown with the times, that has pushed for greater recognition of the Chinese contribution to our culture and to Lone Fir, and wants to honor those women and children who are still here. And is, perhaps, a touch sad that the men aren’t here still, too.

For a long time the denizens of Block 14, where the Chinese and asylum patients are buried, was under the footprint of a three-story office building housing the agency, Metro, which oversees the local pioneer cemeteries, as well as a host of other responsibilities of, arguably, greater importance. Fortunately, the spawning of Friends of Lone Fir and the awakening interest of the local Chinese community coincided with a need for Metro to find more space and vacate the building. Once they were out and the building gone, planning could begin in earnest for a memorial at Block 14 for those once-forgotten communities. We’re in the middle of that process right now.


Part of the process was to have Block 14 blessed by the priests of a local Buddhist temple, which occurred on a recent July Sunday, along with the dedication of three “heritage trees,” and the showing of two documentary films, one of them about the Chinese workers and their families. That plus a little music. Wouldn’t be Portland without a little music.

It was a beautiful late afternoon. The temperature was kissing 90, but it was cool under the tall timber (the lone fir still stand, if no longer alone). I’d guess there were better than two-hundred people there at its busiest and it was comforting to see them wandering among the gravestones and laying their blankets out on a gentle slope down to a temporary stage in the Firemen’s section. It felt like home.

I had to get up early the next day, so I skipped out before the twilight showing of the films. As I was leaving, people were still trickling into the cemetery. Coming to the last crossroad before the exit, I happened to glance at a stone in one corner. It was from 1918, so I’d walked past it uncounted times. Delicately carved in a rustic tradition of rough-hewed stone, peeling signage, and ivy leaves, it’s small and unobtrusive. Not a stone that commands attention. One would hardly notice that it carries an epitaph, which isn’t carved into the face of the stone, as is common, but into the face of the pedestal upon which the small stone stands. Furthermore, the epitaph is hard to read without paying close attention and probably just says, “Too well loved to be forgotten,” anyway. The sort of stone you can pass by forever without really seeing it.

Nonetheless, once I noticed there was an epitaph, I was compelled to decipher it. Mind you, I’m having cataract surgery next month and everything is somewhat of a blur right now, so simple things like reading weathered epitaphs have become a bit of a chore. I had to crouch down and get close, which in itself is a chore, for a good look. The deceased was young Jess Nudsen (which Kay points out was probably “Knudsen”) who died in 1918 at the age of nineteen. I’ll probably never know how Jess died, which is just as well, knowing might remove some of the mystery; and part of the deep attraction of cemeteries is the wide sense of wonder one is so often left with upon viewing a particularly poignant marker. As it is, I was left with one of the most haunting epitaphs in my entire collection:

Some where, some time,
We’ll understand.

Lift that Barge, Tote that Bale Working Skiffs

Cove Cemetery (Cove, OR)
It’s tempting, when considering maritime motifs on cemetery markers, to hark back to our liquid origins and suggest that boats on tombstones recall ancient associations with the water, but I don’t think that’s the case. Certainly, burning bodies on the banks of the Ganges before floating them down river smacks of primordial memory, but I think that water-craft images on Oregonian tombstones are on a par with other vehicular images, which fall into two rough classes: occupational and recreational. You’re either working that boat, or you’re drifting around dreaming.

Tombstone vehicular images, whether of wheeled, water, or air craft, are almost invariably masculine symbols. Occasionally they’re shared with a spouse, especially if one considers RVs, but primarily they’re a man’s world. Women might engrave their monuments with flowers, pets, or a piano (guys get guitars), but men are more likely to carve an image of something that moved. There are occupational images of things other than planes, trains, and automobiles — loggers get represented out here often and I’ve seen a printing press on one stone once — but there’s something primal about boys and things that move, be it skateboards or jet planes. Maybe it’s testosterone: tombstone images of big pieces of equipment are a way for a guy to display his cajones to the world forever. But movement is important. You don’t see images of desks or sales counters or drill presses or labs or cubicles or die stamps on tombstones. It’s train engines, tractor-combines, bow picking gill-netters, or 747s. If it doesn’t move, it’s not worth telling eternity about.

Oaklawn Memorial Park (Corvallis, OR)
Working boats tend to require bigger water than pleasure craft. There aren’t a whole lot of working boats on inland rivers and lakes, save for guide boats and a scattering of minor occupations such as catfish noodlers and frog catchers. A lot of the working boats found on tombstones are military craft, which, I suppose, is a category all of its own. I’m no expert on naval ships, they’re all destroyers to me, though I’ve had two engravings of the aircraft carrier USS Lexington. Naval personnel, of course, are drawn from the entire country and I don’t know if there’s any statistically significant increase of personnel drawn from coastal versus inland communities, but I rather doubt it. In any event, one would expect to find engravings of military craft following normal patterns of personalization over the entire country. I would further suspect that tombstone personalization might be ubiquitous but not uniform across the country; although I have nothing upon which to base that presumption.

River View Cemetery (Portland, OR)
In the set of photos accompanying this post, therefore, there is nothing that geo-locates a tombstone image of a Navy vessel, and to a certain extant the same is true of most of the other commercial craft depicted on local memorial, although there are a few boats pictured which could come from few other places. They aren’t exclusive to the Oregon Territory, but they’re otherwise uncommon and restricted to specialized areas.

Offhand, I’d guess that commercial cargo ships and tankers, while theoretically drawing their work force from the entire country just as the Navy does, in reality share a degree of crossover with the fishing community. There is to an extent an oceanside community that enjoys connections among itself separate from the world a few miles inland, and members of which transfer from one type of vessel to another as opportunity arises. Or, perhaps, as prudence demands. That and the on again/off again, nature of the shipping business — one tends to work several months or years straight and then take several months off — means that it’s easier to maintain seaside employment if one lives close to the sea to begin with; and consequently one is more likely to find engravings of commercial craft in seaside communities than inland. Axiomatic, one might say.

Woodbine/Green Mountain Cemetery (Rainier, OR)
Of the pictured vessels, several are of interest and a couple are very place-specific. Woodbine cemetery, where the image of the tugboat is found, perches above the Columbia River at Rainier, OR, halfway between Portland and the coast, a highly likely place for a tugboat captain to live. Tugs ply both the Columbia River and the open ocean, dragging barges around the world; though I imagine that different vessels, not to mention crews, do different tasks, and it’s not a matter of one tug fits all. Unlike fishing boats, the miscellaneous cargo ships depicted on tombstones are probably not the ship owners proud portraits, as the stones are generally more modest than large ship owners might desire, and more likely represent career vessels. It’s hard to tell just looking at a stone.

Wind River Memorial Cemetery (Carson, WA)
The log tender from a headstone at the small river town of Carson, WA, though, is indubitably a place-specific working boat, evident from the scene shown along with the craft. The body of water is neither ocean nor river nor even a lake (note the leaping fish) but rather a mill pond where logs are stored until processed. Almost miniature little tugs push and pull logs and rafts around these pond, or at least did so in times past, when life was flusher; and that’s what’s memorialized on the stone.

Iman Cemetery (Stevenson, WA)
But it’s the image of the small steamer “Wasco,” in the tiny, eponymous Iman Cemetery on the edge of the river hamlet of Stevenson, WA, that is not only place-specific, but historic, as well. The Wasco was built by one Felix Iman (the eponym) in 1854 and was the third steamer to run between Cascade Locks and The Dalles on the Columbia River. I suggest that non-natives search Google Images for the “Cascades of the Columbia” and “Cascade Locks” to get an idea of what kind of country we’re talking about. The Columbia slices a gorge straight through a snowcapped mountain range here, the Cascades, beginning at The Dalles and ending at the outskirts of Portland. Cascade Locks is in the middle. It’s a world-class chunk of geography.

The first wagon train of immigrants came through the gorge in 1843, making the Wasco an early economic venture for the white population. Iman quickly sold the Wasco and went into the saloon business, from which he immediately exited, as well. Both Felix and his wife, Margaret Windsor Iman have modern markers with brief histories etched into the stones. Hers is particularly dramatic:

Born at Tippecanoe Co., Ind.
1852 Missouri to The Dalles on horse back
Carried motherless babe 500 miles
Took raft down river to Cascades
1853 met and married Felix G. Iman
Survived Indian War of Mar. 26, 1856
Indians burned home
Had 16 children, 9 boys, 7 girls

That was not the half of it. (Notes on her life from an oral transcript of, perhaps, c. 1915 are available on line.)

The Indian attack which she mentions was part of a general uprising in 1856 as a result of a broken treaty on the part of the whites (I know you may find that hard to believe). During the fray the Wasco came under fire from Indians collected where White Salmon is now, across the river from Hood River; but the river is sizable and their balls had no effect

Earlier this month (on the 11th to be exact) I wrote a bit about the Palmer/Bell grave site, on the Washington State side of the Bridge of the Gods (modest name, no?) Norman Palmer, who is buried there with his sister, perished in the same uprising.

Eventually, the Indians were subdued and nine of them hanged, including one who was, according to Mrs. Iman, definitely not guilty; but revenge is often not meted out to the perpetrators of a crime, nor is it necessary. Any Indian will/would do. Mrs. Iman wrote of the hanging that they were “hanged on a tree about one mile from where we lived. Some of them, when asked to talk, shook their heads and put the noose around their own necks. Others laughed at those who were hanging.”

In any event, with the Wasco pulling barges of troops from Portland, the whites won and the steamer subsequently returned to her trade, albeit for only a short period of time. By 1857 she was pretty much out of business on the river. A later newspaper advertisement, from probably the 1860s, offered passage between Bellingham, WA, and Seattle on the “fast and commodious” steamer Wasco for $1; although I can’t be sure it’s the same steamer Wasco. Good price, though.

Lift that barge,
Tote that bale;
Get a little drunk,
And land in jail.

Woodbine/Green Mountain Cemetery (Rainier, OR)

The New Asians

Sunnyside Chimes Memorial Garden
Before taking care of business, I want to introduce you to Betty Blade. Betty lives somewhere in Gotham and keeps tab on the cultural geography of her city through her camera. That should be credit enough, but Betty busies herself by filling in the gaps and rounding out the corners of most of my Flickr entries. She adds all the tags I should be adding but don’t, thanks to incurable laziness (you can laugh, but it’s a deadly disease). More importantly, she often adds tidbits of information or excerpts from poems or song, etc., that speak to whatever photo she is amending. Her far-ranging intellect pulls gems from all over the cultural canon, and without her, my site would be much the poorer. I have no idea for how many people she provides this service, but her efforts on my behalf are prodigious. I jokingly call her my “Boswell,” but she’s nothing of the sort. She’s not chronicling me, she’s augmenting the collection. I owe her big time.

Sunnyside Chimes Memorial Garden
It was Betty who sent me the link to The Buddhist Channel with the story about Oregon’s first Vietnamese Buddhist cemetery, complete with a new statue of a Buddha (which doesn’t, I warn you, look like our traditional vision of a rotund Buddha). That I should first hear of a Portland cemetery story via New York City amazes me, but I thank her for it, nonetheless.

Sunnyside Chimes Memorial Garden
The Buddhist cemetery is not, strictly speaking, an independent cemetery; it is a designated section of a commercial cemetery operation: Sunnyside Chimes Memorial Garden (one of several different tags it hangs upon itself). Across the road from Sunnyside is Gethsemani Catholic Cemetery which supports a SE Asian section of its own.

Being a cemetery within a cemetery is not uncommon here in Portland; besides these examples of SE Asians, there are Jewish cemeteries within two of Metro’s fourteen pioneer cemeteries. (Metro is a local government agency which handles a lot of our civic housekeeping duties.) The Portland Japanese Cemetery is surrounded by Rose City Cemetery, but in that case the two cemeteries are independent of each other.

While its significance may be lost on the rest of the continent, we in the Pacific Northwest pride ourselves on being the doorway to America. Without a doubt, if not the first, then the ample majority of the early immigrants to North and South America came through the Fraser and Columbia River valleys after slinking down the coast from Alaska. That there should be a continuing steady influx here of immigrants from Asia should not be surprising. And the silver lining of our disastrous military foray into SE Asia has been a healthy wave of newcomers from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Once again, their loss is our gain, and consequently we have better restaurants than we ever had. (Me, I’m all for invading Italy. Preëmptive strike against the Mafia. Think of the gastronomic gains!)

Gethsemani Catholic Cemetery
Gethsemani Catholic Cemetery
The colored hand-etched stone face from Gethsemani Catholic Cemetery has no inscription of any kind and is not a part of its SE Asian section, though it clearly has SE Asian elements in its design. The racial composition of the vast crowd is intriguing. This upright is the only upright in the cemetery, though they are being allowed in the Buddhist venture across the road. Almost all the stones in the Catholic cemetery have laser-etched portraits or photoceramic cameos. The Buddhist cemetery is too new to have a track record, but it looks like it will be dominated by portraits, as well.

Gethsemani Catholic Cemetery
On the secular side, the largest Asian “cemeteries” are parts of Lincoln Memorial Park, an old “rural” cemetery on Portland’s East Side, which contains a traditional Chinese cemetery; another Vietnamese Catholic section; a new upright section used, not exclusively but heavily, by Asians; and an even newer pagoda cemetery with preset, identical headstones. I’ve seen a similar arrangement being constructed in a Seattle cemetery and presume it’s following an existing Asian pattern, but that’s merely a guess. The Lincoln Park burial spaces far outnumber the combined totals for Gethsemani and Sunnyside.

Lincoln Memorial Park

Department of Correction and Amplification

Lest I lead you astray, forget everything I’ve said about Willamette National Cemetery. It’s still there, but the ephemera behind the berm have been removed. It’s as sterile as a DI’s… well, you get the picture.

It’s evident that the folks at the VA don’t read this blog (ho-ho) or they might have thought twice about removing the ephemera. Then again, being military bureaucrats, probably not. The US is known the world over for its military cemeteries, for their dignity and often dramatic landscaping; but warm, homey places they’re not. In the end, the Army’s going to bury you in a barrack, too.


Which isn’t to say I don’t like VA cemeteries, I do; but there’s something forlorn about a person standing in the middle of a barren field, head bowed, quietly staring at a patch of concrete at their feet. Makes you long for an inflatable teddy bear, after all. Maybe a plastic whirligig.

In any event, if you’re looking for the equivalent of the Vietnam Wall up behind the berm, like I promised, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s too bad. I’d written to the local press about the ephemera, but no one ever went up and looked. There was no Maya Linn, no big bucks. Just relatives of the deceased. People. You, me. People. Nothing special to write about.

Too late now.

Ciao

Greatness Large & Small

Eugene Masonic Cemetery
Some are born to greatness, others acquire it after long struggle, and others have it thrust upon them. People? No, cemeteries, of course.

I recently ran across a one-post blog (there are a lot of them out there) that said some tantalizing things about cemeteries and made a number of suggestions as to how to pump more life into them, which may seem a touch counterintuitive. My favorite suggestion was to stick a high class restaurant into the middle of them, although I’m not sure how that would work. You go talk to your local cemetery about it.

The author also suggested some things already being done in some cemeteries such as readings; small, historical drama presentations/reenactments; concerts; etc. All in all, practicality of some ideas aside, it was good to see someone thinking about how to restore cemeteries to their former glory. As anyone with a passing knowledge of cemetery history knows, cemeteries were the precursors to parks; and while parks have evolved to fulfill functions cemeteries couldn’t approach, it doesn’t mean that they have outlived their usefulness as parks.

Lone Fir Cemetery
There are two cemeteries in the Dead Man Talking database that are heading back towards being parks. Indeed, they already are parks as much as they are cemeteries: Portland’s Lone Fir and the Eugene Masonic Cemetery. The Eugene cemetery is an exemplar of the rural cemetery movement and had a streetcar line delivering people to its doorstep, even though it was, like other “rural” cemeteries, out in what was then the countryside. That was being born to greatness. Unlike Portland’s River View, a rural cemetery which also was built for but has continually maintained its greatness, Eugene Masonic had a long period of decline and suffered serious vandal damage (and still does) before being consciously returned to greatness by taking a radical new approach as to how the cemetery is regarded and used. It’s all Eugene and all Oregon and it gets constant use by its neighbors. Lone Fir also gets constant use, though it approaches being a park in a more traditional manner.

River View Cemetery
Eugene Masonic is notable at first glance for its shaggy appearance and at closer inspection for the minute detail with which the cemetery is cared for and presented. It looks shaggy because the site is mowed but twice a year and functions as a local wildlife habitat for both animal and plant species. Walking paths throughout the cemetery are kept mowed and are sprinkled with signs ecumenically pointing out significant local species or interesting interments; and to their credit, the interments signaled out for illumination are not necessarily those of city luminaries, but also include short bios of more representative citizenry. (Historical markers always tell as much about the erectors of the markers as the people or events they are commemorating.) They’ve also begun to allow green burials, have erected a charming viewing platform and scatter garden, restored an art deco mausoleum on the property, and a local Jewish organization has reserved part of the cemetery for their members’ use (a practice also found in two Portland pioneer cemeteries). Things are hopping there and neighbors love to come there with their children and dogs, which are kept on the paths and scrupulously cleaned up after (both kids and dogs).

Lone Fir, on the other hand, began life as a Donation Land Claim (DLC) cemetery; which simply means that the original owner of the land set aside part of his or her holdings to serve as a cemetery, one of the most common origins of Oregon Territory cemeteries. Lone Fir grew to greatness due to its location. It too was built in the countryside and soon swallowed by the city outside which it lay. It grew to greatness by having a rich and complex history, which is still evolving. Not designed as a “rural cemetery,” it nonetheless is a major city arboretum and that lone fir (which still stands) has been joined by an astounding variety of trees. It also contains some nice little niche areas, such as a firemen’s section, a heritage rose garden, a Gothic mausoleum, and an emerging Chinese memorial commemorating the Chinese who were disinterred from this cemetery and shipped back to China, providing, of course, that they were adult males. Chinese women and children were left behind. Lone Fir is also the repository for the lion’s share of the interesting monuments in the city; and this goes back to the early days, as it harbors by far the city’s largest collection of Woodmen of the World faux stumps. Yet the modern revival of individualized memorials is well represented here too, with striking new monuments. Not to mentions the proliferation of Russian tombstones with their fanciful scenes and babushkaed photos laser-etched onto black granite. They are ubiquitous. Along with their gardens. The Russians love to create miniature gardens on their cemetery plots, and all summer long you’ll see well dressed women hiking back and forth between water spigots and small garden plots. As a consequence, the once somber tones of the cemetery have been enlivened by countless color spots. It’s all good.

And as a consequence Lone Fir gets heavy use. Not only are the plots going fast (we bought two), but the place is always attended by people. All manner of folk drift though reading the stones or stopping by for a picnic lunch, weather permitting. Musicians can sometimes be found playing quietly in the marble forest, and many a reader has found a comfortable stone to rest their back upon. Drinking isn’t a problem; the grounds are much more likely to be used for smoking a joint. It’s still peaceful, after all.

But greatness in a cemetery is not necessarily defined by its use as a park. Most of the cemeteries in the database that I’d mark as “great” (and surely greatness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder), get little or no park use. Which may be too bad, but it’s true.

Mountain View Corbett Cemetery
“Great” has more to do with ambiance than size. Location helps. Mountain View Corbett Cemetery, the eastern most of Metro’s fourteen pioneer cemeteries, has such a close-up view of Mt. Hood and the surrounding agricultural fairyland that, if the wind’s not blowing, makes it a delightful place to be. For a tiny cemetery, it has more than its fair share of personalized monuments, another mark of a great cemetery. Taft Pioneer Cemetery with its majestic view of the Pacific Coast has also inspired above average memorializations. Pleasant Hill Cemetery, on the other hand, while having one of the best caches of personalizations in the state, is located smack alongside busy Hwy. 58 southeast of Eugene. I attribute its lively character to being close to Ken Kesey’s ancestral home. There’s still many a Merry Prankster hiding in the woods of Lane County. In any event, it proves one can have a splendid cemetery in a mediocre setting.

Pleasant Hill Cemetery
Genealogists and local historians might qualify “great” by who, how many, and what kind of records a cemetery possesses. Willamette National would qualify by many standards as a great cemetery, but other than nice lawns and beautiful committal chambers its really only “great” aspect is the personalized memorials hidden behind berms at committal shelter no. 3. Those moved me to tears. But I can see a genealogist going ga-ga over the records. Though I can’t understand how the Vietnam Wall can get such publicity, while the memorials behind the berm are ignored. Go to Dead Man Talking Flickr site and see for yourself. It only scratches the surface.

Willamette National
I qualify cemeteries by how I feel when I stroll around them. That’s how I began. Inveterate backroaders, cemeteries have long been a pleasurable stopping point for Kay and me while traversing the outback. A good place to check out a few stories, get a grip on community history, and see how the locals handle death. Always a fun trip. Approached that way, a cemetery has to stand on its own merits. The stories behind the tombstones will remain enigmas. The making up of ones own imaginary history is often good enough. In any event, who is buried in a cemetery is of little import for the casual visitor, and what constitutes “good” in a cemetery has to be apparent at first glance. Cemeteries are defined by the memorials they keep.

Taft Pioneer Cemetery
That’s my take, anyway. Thank God you have yours.

See you at the sepulcher.

So, You're Dead Already

Beth Israel

All geography is divided into two part: physical and cultural. The study of cemeteries is a branch of cultural geography. Cultural geography is the social sciences in situ.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can go on to the cemeteries.

You’ll recall in blog one, when I lamented the dear departed Stew Albert, that I promised more on Jewish cemeteries. This is it.

Not unlike geography, all Jews — well, almost all Jews — are divided into two parts, Sephardic and Ashkenazi, which roughly correspond to Mediterranean and Eastern European. The Mediterranean Jews are, more or less, those left over from the diaspora, whereas no one really knows how the Ashkenazi came about. There are competing theories. There are far-flung Jewish outposts in places one would never suspect, such as China and India, and even — to everyone’s utter surprise — South Africa, where a tribe insisted forever, to their neighbor’s ridicule and amusement, that they too, despite being totally like their neighbors in behavior and appearance, were Jewish; only to discover in this time of miracles and DNA analyses, that, not only were they Jewish, but that they were Cohens, an upper, priestly class of Jews. Suffice it to say that American Jews are, for the most part, either Sephardic or Ashkenazi, though that distinction is lost on the average American.

What it means in terms of cemeteries is that Jewish cemeteries are both religious and ethnic enclaves. That you don’t get one without the other. Which is not the case in your average cemetery. Even the most tightly religious Christian or nonaligned cemetery counts among its interred people from all parts of the world and backgrounds. You can be a Hottentot and be buried in the highly Scandinavian Svensen Pioneer Cemetey, for example, and while you may have to be a Catholic to be buried in St. Wenceslaus, you don’t have to be Bohemian. Which all goes towards making Jewish cemeteries unique: they aren’t like other cemeteries.

Beth Israel

They aren’t like other cemeteries in a lot of other ways, as well.

[But, again, before I go any further, I have to issue my standard disclaimer: what follows is local knowledge. How the Jews manage cemeteries in Fort Lauderdale or Scarsdale, I have no idea. I’m talking Oregon here. And not all of Oregon at that.]

For one thing, they’re hard to find. I spent months tracking down Neveh Zedek, even though it’s on street maps. Even when you find their names and addresses, they aren’t the easiest places to locate. Only Beth Israel is visible to the casual passerby, all the rest require driving out of the normal flow of traffic to find them.

There are seven Jewish cemeteries in the Portland metropolitan area, five independent and two as elements of Metro pioneer cemeteries. The five independent cemeteries are all distinguished by having live-in caretaker/guardians. A long history of cemetery desecration has undoubtedly led to that practice. The East Side Jewish Community of Portland (that’s their name) maintains a small enclave within Douglass Pioneer, which is exposed but in a cemetery that is unexpectedly located and not given to vandalism; while, as mentioned in “Stew, I Hardly Knew Ya,” Havurah Shalom hides in the secretive Jones Pioneer, another Metro cemetery.

Shaarie Torah

Ahavai Shalom shares Portland’s Boot Hill with River View, Riverview Abbey, Greenwood Hills, Beth Israel, and the GAR Cemetery, but it’s at the end of SW 1st St., a street you’ll never have cause to drive down, unless you’re heading knowingly for that cemetery. It, Beth Israel, and Neveh Zedek all share common features. Each is very well maintained, the lawns are lush, the plantings pristine, and the monuments are clean and well cared for. Unlike their neighbors, they tend to scrunch their burial plots together, leaving broad open spaces for the future, rather than filling in randomly from all over, which is the normal practice. They both sport endowed chapels. As one would expect from Jewish cemeteries, they have the appearance of attention to detail, respect, pride, and good taste. Many markers are piled with pebbles as a customary reminder of someone’s visit. Epitaphs tend to extol the virtues of family, good works, and modest self-appraisal.

Kesser Israel

The same could be said of Shaarie Torah, another Jewish cemetery on Portland’s east side. It shares the traits of care, live-in protectors, endowed chapels, and clustering of stones. It also shares its grounds with another Jewish cemetery, Kesser Israel, and there is where the uniformity, and perhaps the stereotype, breaks down. Kesser Israel is anything but well-cared for, well-maintained, or properly arranged. They do have a live-in protector, but that house is as ramshackle as the cemetery and looks to depend on pit bulls instead of people to do the job (though to their credit, I saw none). The graves here are more or less strung out in lines, but the open space, instead of being a greensward waiting for its intended use, is a wasteland and junk pile waiting for reclamation. One would be ill-advised to saunter here. Beware the rusty nail. The monuments, too, are often unlike any others in the state, much less in other Jewish cemeteries. A chain-link fence divides Kesser Israel and Shaarie Torah and there is no gate between them — you have to go “out and around” if you want to visit them both — and Shaarie Torah on their side has covered the fence in ivy so that their neighbor isn’t visible. Surely there’s an uncomfortable history hidden here somewhere.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say one cemetery represents the Ashkenazi and one the Sephardim, but at the least they demonstrate that what from the outside might appear to be a monolithic culture, Judaism, is in reality a fractured, multifaceted, and sometimes divisive community, just like yours and mine.

What the Jews do for a living is reflected in their cemeteries, just like in yours and mine, as well. The geography of cemeteries is intimately tied to occupation. It’s not an accident that most Jewish cemeteries are in the Portland area while most Finnish cemeteries are in the woods or along the water. Finnish tombstones are engraved with images of log trucks and fishing boats. Jewish tombstones are… Well, they don’t engrave tombstones with desks or shop counters, at least not that I’ve seen. But occupation is reflected, not only in tombstone design, but in tombstone location. Jewish cemeteries cluster in Portland because Jewish occupations in America are traditionally urban and there has to be a thriving business, financial, or intellectual community before enough Jews arrive to require their own burial ground.

Which leads us to the non-Portland, Jewish cemeteries in Oregon, of which I know three; one of which, Temple Beth Israel’s enclave within Eugene’s Masonic Cemetery, mimics the arrangement with Portland’s Metro for Havurah Shalom and the East Side Jewish Community. The other two, though, are almost defunct. One is part of Jacksonville’s history cemetery (sorry, I have no photos) and the other is Albany's Waverly Jewish Cemetery, which does boast a fairly new grave. They’re interesting because they mark the location of former Jewish communities, which implies that both towns had times of former glory, which they did.

Waverly Jewish

As the southern Willamette Valley fills up and the university continues to grow, perhaps someday Eugene will boast its own, independent Jewish cemetery. But maybe not for a while. I suspect that its Jewish community is closely tied with the traditions of Jewish activism which populate Havurah Shalom rather than the more commercial Jewish occupations, and that the idea of mingling with ones fellow intellectuals in an eco-friendly display cemetery appeals to its sensibilities. Regardless, it takes a good Jewish cemetery or two before one can say they’ve “arrived.” For Eugene, perhaps, the harbor is in view.

Stew, I Hardly Knew Ya

Stew and I went back a long ways. He was two years older than me — that would put him in the class of ‘57 — but that’s close enough. We were both pre-baby boomers. We were both radical revolutionaries. Stew was known and loved by everyone. I’m loved, I’m told, by my family.

Hey! A love’s a love.

Stew never heard of me. I’m sure he never heard of my claim to fame, either, and, unfortunately, neither have I. Just as well, I suppose; I would have squandered it. I’ll tell you one day about my groupie, but not now.

That I ran across Stew’s grave in a tiny, hidden Jewish cemetery here in Portland should not have surprised me, because I knew he’d died here recently. I hadn’t thought that he was Jewish, but that doesn’t surprise me, either. Knowing he was Jewish and knowing who tends to end up in Havurah Shalom, the hidden cemetery, could have enabled me to put two and two together. I was not abled and hence didn’t put two and two together until I got home and downloaded my pictures and looked at his tombstone again: “Stew Albert, 1939-2006, Husband and father/ Mentor and friend/ Scholar and poet/ Revolutionary and rabbinic inspiration.”

“Revolutionary and rabbinic inspiration?” Why, that’s Stew Albert, I blurted out loud, and began to cry. It was as if I suddenly run across the grave of a friend whom I hadn’t known had died. It wasn’t just Stew laying there. It was part of my life. Jesus Christ, I muttered, has it come to this?



Stew Albert (check out his site) was a cofounder of the Yippies along with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffmann, and he raged against the machine until the very end. His signature post remains: “My politics have not changed.” While Stew was disrupting the Chicago Convention in 1968, I was getting arrested for running the “underground” press in Minneapolis; and, if we never met, our lives ran somewhat in parallel, if in no other fashion than we both ended up in Portland. They stopped running in parallel a bit ago when Stew up and died, which is how I came to find his grave in Havurah Shalom.

Finding Stew is no easy task. First one has to find Havurah Shalom Cemetery. The intersection where it is next to has been rearranged since I was there last and it took me two whacks to get it correct. It’s behind the Sylvan Hill Church at the Sylvan exit from Hwy. 26 at the crest of the hill before plunging towards Portland. Southeast corner. But it’s not as simple as it sounds.

Regardless, when you find the church, find its parking lot around back. (There is no parking around front, so that part is easy.) At the far back corner of the parking lot you’ll notice gates leading through the hedge. If you pass by the gates you’ll be greeted by a small sign telling you that you are in Jones Pioneer Cemetery, one of fourteen pioneer cemeteries under Metro’s (a Portland, OR, area regional government) jurisdiction. Jones doesn’t have a lot of monuments, and many of them are scattered in an almost unfriendly fashion away from each other under a dark canopy of hardwoods, with a denser clustering of newer graves higher on the hill where the trees thin out or disappear; but the largest grouping of graves is in the farthest away corner yet, filled with light and detailed from the rest of the cemetery by a low hedge: Havurah Shalom, a small cemetery devoted to Jewish civic activists.


Havurah Shalom, like most if not all Jewish cemeteries, is associated with a congregation with, as is usually the case, the same name. It is a Reconstructionist Jewish community, which means that it emphasizes evolutionary social development and community politics. Where else are you going to bury a guy like Stew? You don’t even have to be Jewish to belong, so long as you don’t mind eating blintzes and knishes.


Given that cemeteries reflect their communities, the particulars of Havurah Shalom describe an unusual and enriched gathering of souls. Havurah Shalom is not the only Jewish cemetery within a Metro cemetery, the East Side Jewish Community of Portland relatively recently opened up a small cemetery within Troutdale’s Douglass Cemetery, but Havurah Shalom set the precedent and the standards. Nothing announces Havurah Shalom, there is no signage, but that you’re suddenly in a Jewish enclave is evident as soon as you reach the cluster of monuments. Many of the stones, of course, are emblazoned with the Star of David, but if you look around you’ll notice that many of them have acquired small piles of pebbles brought by mourners and that an unusual number of the stones are natural. But even more noticeable is the nature of the epitaphs, which tend to reflect the community activism of their members. Indeed, some stones go so far as to state that their person was an “activist,” plain and simple. This is not a gaudy community, but it is straight talking. Restraint and dignity reign. Stew has a lot of good company.


Havurah Shalom is typical of Portland Jewish cemeteries in being hidden. There are five other Jewish cemeteries in the Portland area, besides the two in Metro cemeteries, and all five have live-in surveillance families in on-premise housing; and four are located where you’ll never accidentally drive by them (Beth Israel at the top of Burlingame is quite noticeable). The Jews have learned some hard lessons about vandalism and have taken the most surefire method available for dealing with it. East Side and Havurah Shalom try to hide in plain sight, as it were.

Jewish cemeteries are not the only ones where religion and ethnicity are intertwined, but no Christian church cemetery ties the two so closely together. One could argue that, say, Saint Wenceslaus Cemetery in St. Helens is an example of a Christian ethnic cemetery, but nothing restricts Christianity to the Bohemians, as Judaism does to the Jewish people (whomever they might be, which is, admittedly, a slippery slope). Joining a Reconstructionist Jewish community will not make one Jewish. But if you were to start a stroll through Oregon’s ethnic cemeteries, Jewish cemeteries, because of their clarity, are a good place to begin; and if you’re going to start with Jewish cemeteries, Havurah Shalom is as good a choice as any. The others are equally interesting, and we’ll get to them by-and-by, but for my money this is a high point of our culture: it shows the best of who we can be. It’s American, it’s inclusive, it’s distinctive, it’s embracing. You’ll even note, as you walk through Jones Pioneer approaching Havurah Shalom, that, as the light expands and the newer graves begin to appear, they too, if not directly a part of Havurah Shalom, reflect its spirit. Conscience, peace, and dignity find shelter here. It is a good place to die.



A set of photos devoted to Havurah Shalom can be found on my Flickr site. A link from each photo will take you to a map and aerial photo of the cemetery location.

The Dreaded Introduction

A bit of introduction here that no one will read; but this is, after all, blog #1 and you might want an idea of where we’re going.

We’re going to the cemetery, Oregon cemeteries, for the most part, but without restrictions. Along the way we’ll find out what kind of cemeteries there are, how they function, and how they got there. In the process we’ll find out who lives in Oregon — or wherever — and what they think about life and family. We’ll learn about place and how place affects people. We’ll learn about how society is changing its view of death and that society has always been changing its views. We’ll see how the cemetery industry was born, how it was shaped, and what forces currently move it.

There is no more intimate part of life than death. It’s the other bookend. As Benjamin Franklin observed two-hundred years ago: if you want to know a people, visit their cemeteries. He didn’t say visit their watering holes or subway stations. We’ve spent the last several years finding out just who lives in Oregon. We’ve been to their cemeteries. Not all of them, we’re still working on, in particular, the southwest quadrant and big chunks of Eastern Oregon, but we’ve dropped in on close to 500 Oregon cemeteries, plus another sixty or seventy from elsewhere (we’re staring to prowl Washington). You can take a virtual tour of them all by yourself at my site. Over here on the blog we’ll talk about what it all means and where the fun stuff can be found.


OUR GOAL

(Oh boy, this is where is gets heavy.)

Cemeteries are a sort of wiki-place where the art and history of a community are on public display and to which everyone can contribute. There are no curators or academicians to decide what goes and what doesn’t. Only the community mores regulate that. (And we’ll see how well they succeed.) Before there were parks, there were cemeteries. People flocked to them by the tens of thousands. They had to have traffic cops on the weekends. They had to have rules about who could ride their horse into the cemetery and who couldn’t. In fact, cemetery visiting became so popular that the big-name cemetery designer of his day, a guy by the name of Frederick Law Olmsted, finally said, hey, let’s build a cemetery, but without the bodies. People could still come by the thousands but the upkeep would be infinitely simpler. Let’s, he said, build a park.

Well, they did build parks, and slowly people stopped hanging out in cemeteries. Soon all that art and history was being built, but nobody was visiting; they were all down at Central Park.

We’d like to reverse that trend. We don’t expect cemeteries to replace parks, nor do we suggest planting stiffs all through them (green burials notwithstanding), but we do think cemeteries are worth returning to their former glory as fun and entertaining places to visit. We like the spirit of places like Camp Polk Cemetery, which is riddled with fire pits and handmade benches. We’d like you to come out and visit your local cemeteries, and meet your neighbors in the process.

If you go, we’ll see you there.