Lone Fir Cemetery

The link goes to the website of The Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery. Many of the contact links seem to be broken, but this info is still correct as of today: Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery, 503-775-6278 (Portland number). This cemetery is the final resting place of many Oregon Pioneers, including Asa Lovejoy and Gov. George Law Curry. Metro, the Portland regional government, has some of the history of the cemetery here. The Political Graveyard, a very interesting site, lists other politicians who are buried here.

The cemetery will have staff from the Friends of Lone Fir available all Memorial Day weekend to help you find the graves of the famous and ordinary folks buried here. In addition, they hold a midsummer (dates to follow!) event showcasing period reenactments of some of the people who are buried there. If you have relatives resting in Lone Fir, they would love to hear from you about your family stories. My great grand aunt, Lucinda Alnora (Steen) Taylor Wilson Auld (she outlived at least 2 of them ) is buried there.

Cemeteries are great places to learn about and reflect on the history of a place. Careful reading of the stones will tell you about storms, epidemics and other disasters. Curious social facts will come to light. There is a marker in the Franklin Butte Cemetery at Scio, Oregon, that memorializes a husband and wife, both doctors. Woman doctors weren't very common until after the 1950s. What does this say about the society they lived in, and what extraordinary people they must have been?

Older cemeteries are full of tiny graves, some with no marker, some with a small stone bearing just initials, that hold babies. Children died in appalling numbers in the 19th and early 20th century. Mothers and infants both died from the perils of childbirth. Young men died in accidents and from epidemics. We live in historically exceptional times and an exceptional place: in America in the 21st century we don't face starvation every winter and spring, if we break a leg we are unlikely to die from complications, pneumonia is largely preventable and often treatable. Diabetes can be managed, infants with heart defects can be saved by an operation, appendicitis very rarely results in death. Just 100 years ago, this wasn't true.

As we approach Oregon's Sesquicentennial celebration, marking 150 years of statehood in 2009, we should take the time to learn, and yes to teach our children, what it meant to be a pioneer in the 1840s or 1850s. Think about it -- personal sanitation? baths? washing clothes? growing, in some cases killing your own food, and not eating until you had? The list goes on.

So spend some time at your local cemetery this Memorial Day, or if you are camping or even just hanging out at home, talk about the way we used to live.