By ROBERT WHALE
rwhale@auburn-reporter.com
Some members of the White River Buddhist Temple would like to use Auburn’s Pioneer Cemetery, 8th St. NE and Auburn Way North.
But until open spaces can be found there, such wishes must wait.
That’s why the City of Auburn and the White River Valley 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.
Two weeks ago, the City of Auburn received the raw data from Penhall from those radar scans.
“Our next task is to roll all this together — then we may well have a firm handle on what graves exist, what areas have headstones only, and what areas are open,” said Museum Director Patricia Cosgrove.
Already the City’s Global Information System staff are busy overlaying the data onto a drawing of the cemetery that shows where interment sites should be.
Cosgrove said that task should take “a couple of weeks at least.”
The City is working via an interlocal agreement with the King County Landmarks Commission in a bid to win landmark status for the cemetery, which, if successful, would qualify it for grants.
Here’s what’s funding the project. First, 4Culture of King County awarded WRVM a grant to write a landmark nomination for the cemetery. Next came a surprise – an unsolicited $20,000 grant from King County to cover the research and preservation work.
Pioneer Cemetery was 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. An annotated plat map dating from the 1920s displays handwritten notes that indicate who was buried where.
“There was a lot of coming and going as people moved their relatives from the flooding cemetery to the other cemetery up the hill,” Cosgrove told the Auburn City Council Monday.
And therein lies the quandary.
Hilary Pittenger, the White River Valley Museum’s curator of collections, has already completed her research to identify who is in the cemetery and which graves were moved to Mountain View Cemetery after the latter was established on the hill west of Auburn about 1890 to escape the then-annual flooding.
“Most of the graves left at Pioneer were Japanese members of the White River Buddhist temple,” Pittenger recently told the Auburn Reporter.
Cosgrove added that the ground-penetrating radar appears to have revealed a good chunk of undisturbed ground at the cemetery from all those relocated graves, but whether that is actually true or not will have to wait upon consultation with records and the like.
Members of the White River Buddhist Temple began using the cemetery about 1900, and in 1914 took on stewardship of the site. For 80 years, Chiyokichi Natsuhara, his son, Frank, and Frank’s son, Charles, members of the temple, tended the cemetery.
Even today, the ties between the Buddhist congregation and the cemetery are strong.
Still, bringing the project to completion is going to take some doing.
For one thing, the immigrant Japanese sometimes installed monuments that look like grave markers but nobody is buried under them. Two documented examples of this were cenotaphs for Chiyokichi’s parents. Indeed, according to the most accurate information available, all of the Japanese burials are interment sites for ashes.
Then, too, Cosgrove said, records aren’t exactly spot on about how many Caucasian people were moved to Mountain View and how many still lie in the old cemetery.
Finally, many of the markers are written in Kanji, Japanese characters, and some are badly worn by time and the elements, some are lost, and some were stolen or defaced during WWII.
“One of the outcomes we hope for is, once landmarked, we will be able to apply for grants to do some restoration,” Cosgrove said.
Jennifer Meisner, King County’s Historic Preservation Officer, told the Auburn Council on Monday that a public hearing on Aug. 4 will mark one of the final steps in the landmark process. As part of the process, Auburn Landmark’s Commission will convene, too, review the nomination and vote on the designation.
“Landmark status does not preclude the property from continuing to be used,” Meisner said.
Daryl Faber, director of Auburn Parks, Arts and Recreation, which oversees the cemetery, said the City averages about two services there annually. To be interred there, he said, one must be a direct descendant of a person who is already buried there.
“It’s quite the little treasure, and it has a lot of stories to tell,” Cosgrove said of the cemetery.
