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Cemetery plotting

Group seeks 10-year plan to revamp historic graveyard plagued by vandalism

By Scott Hewitt, Columbian staff writer
Published: December 2, 2009, 12:00am
4 Photos
Norma Watson looks at a head stone at the Olde City Cemetery.
Norma Watson looks at a head stone at the Olde City Cemetery. (The Columbian/Zachary Kaufman) Photo Gallery

Norma Watson hates driving west on Mill Plain Boulevard past Old City Cemetery.

Not because she’s afraid of ghosts. It’s because the iron fence between the historic graveyard and the street appears near death, too. A city planner once told Watson the bent black bars look romantic, but Watson sees nothing but blight.

“It’s fraught with problems,” she said of the 10-acre cemetery — the final resting place of pioneers and early community leaders with still-famous names such as Slocum and Proebstel, Leverich and Caples, Wintler and Short. That’s right: Esther Short, a true tough-as-nails pioneer mother and early landowner who donated what became Vancouver’s town square, is buried here beneath a modest white tombstone that’s frankly hard to find.

The city should do better with the graves of its historical celebrities rather than stand aside while vandalism, drug activity and trespassing run rampant around them, Watson believes.

“Here’s the perfect opportunity to introduce our history to people, and we’re not embracing it,” she said.

(She said that’s not a dig against Bob McKechnie, city cemetery maintenance leader, whose dedication and longevity on the scene has earned him the affectionate nickname “Cemetery Bob.” But he’s only one man with one budget and three city cemeteries to tend, she said.)

So Watson, a leader of the Central Park Neighborhood Association, is driving an effort to gather all the groups, officials and citizens interested in improving the cemetery and write a 10-year plan that the city can adopt as its own. The neighborhood association recently won a $5,000 city grant to get that work going; it has already paid for the cemetery’s first topographical survey.

An initial stakeholders meeting will be held early this month, Watson said; she’s hoping to see everyone from the police and fire departments to Parks and Recreation to historical and genealogical enthusiasts.

Meanwhile, the Clark County Genealogical Society won an $8,000 grant from Clark County this year to do headstone restoration and other repair work — everything from cleaning inscriptions and repositioning toppled stones to catching the big marble sphere that vandals love to push from its perch and roll across the grass.

The genealogical society really stretched that grant, according to Richard Engstrom: It hired Vancouver Granite, a local company with a history of cemetery repairs, and restored 40 stones to their former glory.

Peri Muhich is passionate about cemeteries.

“I love them because there’s history, there’s art, there’s music, there’s poetry,” she said. “There’s so much of our culture.”

“There’s mystery,” added Watson.

For example, there’s C L G. Those initials, capitalized in marble, are all anybody knows about the occupant of the cemetery’s only crypt, which stands in the northwest quadrant. Despite a detailed collection of burial records and maps compiled by the genealogical society, unanswered questions still abound.

“We don’t know that our burial records are completely accurate,” Engstrom said.

The cemetery was founded in 1867 and was spurred — in keeping with so much Vancouver history — by the creation of a highway. At that time, burials were one within the present limits of the Vancouver barracks and at a cemetery near the Academy building. But when the state started building a big north-south route through town, the city went searching for another suitable piece of land for a municipal cemetery. Eventually, it bought 10 acres of John Maney’s donation land claim between Mill Plain Boulevard and 13th Street near Grand. Many graves were moved to this ground; others went elsewhere, including the military and Catholic cemeteries up on Fourth Plain Boulevard.

That was in 1867. By 1869, there was already a problem as some folks had made use of the new city cemetery without actually buying their plots. Eventually a “potter’s field” for the poor was created in the northeastern quadrant of the cemetery. It is said that many bodies are buried close together, side by side, in what is virtually a single unmarked grave.

Among them are the remains of Edward Gallagher, the only man ever to be legally hanged in Clark County and, as portrayed by J.J. Wampock, a real diabolical snickerer. (Gallagher was convicted of murder after entering an insanity plea, and was executed in 1890; a press account said he wore a “sickly idiotic smile and a glare of the eye that was startling to behold.”) He was the spookiest character to rise from the grave and greet the living during cemetery tours offered Halloween weekend by the Vancouver Heritage Ambassadors — another group Muhich is involved with.

Other colorful characters on the Heritage Ambassadors’ tour were early mayors and firefighters, blacksmiths and businessmen — and some very strong women, including Hazel Dell settler Sarah Jane Anderson and newspaper publisher Mollie Metcalf Ewing.

To bring these fascinating figures further to life, Watson is envisioning historical signs, brochures and walking maps for the cemetery, along with official inclusion in the Discovery Loop Trail that traverses downtown Vancouver, Fort Vancouver and the historic waterfront area. A “Friends of the Old City Cemetery” group may be in the offing.

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Better lighting and maintenance are crucial, Watson said. She wants to see the city crank up its classy historical lamps again. Although city water lines are nearby, they’ve never been extended into the cemetery. New wheelchair-friendly walkways are needed to replace today’s gravel paths.

Easy access is another priority, she said. Police can’t drive into the cemetery because it has a single gate that’s always locked; only Vancouver Public Works has the key. For law-abiding pedestrians, there’s one real way in: a well-hidden break in the fence at the northwestern corner of the site. One time, Watson said, she was ready to leave but realized the exit was clear across the cemetery — so she did what she figures nighttime trespassers and vandals do, and just rolled through a gap beneath that ghost of a fence on Mill Plain Boulevard.

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