Goat herd visit advances Lone Pine cemetery project

In a lonely stand of pine trees beside a wheat field west of Tekoa, lie the graves of a people from a time long ago.

No sign marks this cemetery, but some of the tombstones have been cleared and scrubbed clean. Many are now readable.

Over the past 10 years, a group of descendants of the people buried in the Lone Pine Cemetery have been gathering to clean up the cemetery as a way of paying tribute to the finished lives that made theirs possible.

Most of the 60 graves on the hill are people who settled in the area as homesteaders in the late 1800s. The earliest birth date on a gravestone is 1809 and the latest death date is 1953.

Many of the graves are children under the age of five.

“You can just feel the people that are there,” said Jo Ann Savitz of Tacoma. Her husband, Jim, has a brother and two great-grandparents buried there.

The Savitz couple, along with a dozen or so other descendants who form the Friends of Lone Pine Cemetery, have spent the past few summers scrubbing tombstones and clearing brush.

“We had shorts on and the growth was so high. We were trying to find Jim’s family’s burial site,” said Savitz. “We came out and our legs were bloody.”

Most recently, descendant Fred Smith of Vancouver hired the services of 250 goats from Edwall to eat up all the dense brush on the graves.

The goats were guests at the cemetery for four days with owner Craig Madsen and a herding dog. Fencing was used to keep them contained.

Jo Ann Savitz wrote in a later press release the goats “ate to their hearts content!”

The goat grazing revealed several graves that had been overgrown.

The group is looking for more people, descendants or not, to join them. Many more hours of work are needed.

Neither Oakesdale or Tekoa fund maintenance work on the cemetery, and that leaves funding and clean up to descendants and others.

Jim said his great-grandfather, Ichabod Clark and his wife Lucy settled a half mile from the cemetery in the late 1800s. They had around 10 children.

Jim’s mother was their grandchild, and the Clarks raised her. Jim, who was born in 1934, said he has a few memories as a small child of his great-grandparents.

“They had an old organ that they brought in the wagon train,” said Jim. “I would try that and they also had a wind-up record player that I would play.”

Now, once a year, he gets on his knees to restore their tombstones and remember his family.

“The lives of these people that are buried there would be so incredible if you could get (information) on all of these people,” Jo Ann said. “And what the cemetery looked like in the early 1900s - that’s what I’d like to see.”

Jim said members of his immediate family are buried at Tekoa, and he and Jo Ann, want to be buried there.

For more information or to help with the clean-up, call the Savitzs at (253) 752-3247, or e-mail jimsavitz@comcast.net.