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.

Mothers' Day -- grandmothers

My maternal grandmother, Luta Marie (Steen) Newton, was born 12 Feb 1883 in Tekoa, Whitman County, Washington. She was the oldest child of the seven children George Leonadas and Virgil Mae (Prettyman) Steen would have in the next 27 years. Her parents lived in a logging camp when she was conceived, and didn't get to town to legalize their relationship until January, 1883. Grandma would never tell her real age, partly because of her embarrassment about this.

Marie (as she was always called) met and married George Sidney Newton in Idaho in 1913. The following year, Virgie Mae died, leaving Ernest, Dova, Alvin, Mildred and Georgia all under 16. Marie and George Newton took them in, and raised them as best they could. In the 1920s, George Steen also came to live them. My mother was a young child then, but she remembered that her Grandpa cheated at cards, and blamed all bad weather or natural disasters on "those Rooshins" (the Russian Revolution occurred in 1917).

Marie never learned to drive, and was dependent on my father all through my childhood to take her places -- both on vacation with us and just everyday chores like shopping -- until my mother got her own car and could take over. My uncle was in the Navy, and seldom home, although I do remember Grandma going to Hawaii one year to spend a month with his family. She brought home ViewMaster slides of the islands that were my delight all during the 1950s. She also had two stereoptican viewers with photographs from the "old days" that amused me for hours on end.

In the 1950s, Grandma's youngest brother Alvin would come and stay with her in the winter. He was a prospector in Idaho most of the year, with a burro and a pack. He left the burro with friends and came to stay in Oregon City when the weather got too cold. He taught me to play cribbage when I was only 4. Of course, in cribbage it is not only legal to cheat, it is your absolute duty to cheat if you can get away with it. I can remember Grandma standing behind me and saying "Alvin! You're cheating that baby! How can you do that?". And Alvin looking up with mild blue eyes and replying, "If she would learn to count, I couldn't cheat her." I grew up counting things in groups of 15, rather than the more usual 10!

In the 1960s, after Grandpa died, both my parents and Leo moved to California. Grandma sold her place and moved in to senior housing near Napa, where Leo lived. Leo died in 1969, and Grandma moved to Hayward, where my parents lived. Alvin came to live with her, and her sister MIldred lived in Santa Cruz, not too far away.

One year at Christmas time, Mom took Grandma to the local shopping mall for Christmas shopping one evening. Grandma got tired, and sat down on a bench to wait for Mom. At some point, she decided she had waited long enough, and called a cab and went home. Poor mom! She had mall security looking everywhere for her fragile 85 year old mother -- and she wasn't to be found. Mom called home, and summoned dad and I to help. But before we left the house, dad called grandma's apartment, and was informed by Alvin that Marie had been home for about an hour, and had just gone to bed.

The taste of fresh raspberries on cold cereal, or tart pie cherries in a pie bring back her memory to me.