Cemetery earns landmark status
Published 5:00 pm Thursday, September 22, 2016
People have called the .77-acre cemetery at 802 Auburn Way N., by many names in its 150-plus years of existence: Faucett Family Cemetery; Slaughter Precinct Cemetery, Auburn Japanese Cemetery; and today, Auburn Pioneer Cemetery.
But official landmark? Nope.
Until now, that is.
Via an interlocal agreement, the City of Auburn and the King County Landmarks Commission recently worked together to win landmark status for the cemetery.
With the designation, opportunities open for the cemetery.
“One of the outcomes now that it is landmarked is we will be able to apply for grants to do some restoration,” said Patricia Cosgrove, director of the White River Valley Museum.
“It’s quite the little treasure, and it has a lot of stories to tell,” Cosgrove told the Auburn Reporter recently.
Established in the 1860s on the old Fawcett farm as a gravesite for several of the Fawcett’s children, in 1878 it was set aside for wider use as “The Slaughter Precinct Cemetery.” The first plat map was filed with King County in 1889.
Because of seasonal flooding in the early years of the community, many of the people who were buried there were later moved up to Mountain View Cemetery.
Landmark status does not preclude the property from continuing to be used. The City averages about two services there annually. To be interred there, one must be a direct descendant of a person who is already buried there.
Indeed, some members of the White River Buddhist Temple would like to use the cemetery.
But until open spaces can be confirmed there, such wishes must wait.
That’s why the City of Auburn and the museum recently hired Penhall Technologies, more often employed for finding underground pipes and wiring for concrete work, to inventory Pioneer Cemetery with ground-penetrating radar.
Today the City is assembling the raw data it received from Penhall from those radar scans.
Cosgrove said the scanning wasn’t as conclusive as she had hoped, and other technologies may need to be employed.
