Lone Pine cemetery group eyes restoration, sanction

A group of descendants of 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 their’s possible.

Friends of the Lone Pine Cemetery met Friday morning at the C and D Bar and Grill in Tekoa to eat some grub, swap news and talk over the next steps to improve the cemetery. They’ve been meeting once or twice a year for several years now, with an aim to get the cemetery looking new again.

One couple drove in all the way from Tacoma, another couple came up from Walla Walla and one man, Fred Smith, drove over from Vancouver.

Most of the 60 graves are for people who homesteaded between Oakesdale and Tekoa in the mid-1800s.

The earliest birth date on a gravestone is 1809 and the latest year of a decease is 1953. Many of the graves are children under the age of five.

The cemetery is overgrown with lilacs and tall pine trees. It lacks a sign and its fence is mostly down.

Friday, the group discussed several ideas, one of which is to get a road built through the cemetery.

The community has already shown up to help. George Torpey of the Coeur d’Alene tribe is donating the 60 tons of gravel and the work it will take to build a road into the graveyard.

Cal Chase, co-owner of the C and D Bar and Grill, happened to be around the morning they met, and offered to hook them up with someone who could remove a tree on the property.

“We can’t take that down. That’s our lone pine,” joked Jim Erwin, who drove from Walla Walla with his wife. Erwin also has ancestors buried at Lone Pine.

Halfway through the meeting, Fred Smith pulled out a historic, detailed map of the plots of graves.

Walking through the cemetery can tug at the heart strings, said Sue Smith as she looked over the map.

Sue Smith, wife of Rod Smith who has a great- grandfather and great-grandmother buried there, said she aches to know the story behind the grave of Martha Kizer and her three children.

Kizer’s twins both died four months after they were born, and Kizer herself died in 1884. Her eight-year-old son died a year later in 1885.

“I think about this lady and her babies often. It tugs at my heart,” Sue Smith said as the group poured over the map.

Most of the descendants have spent time on their knees scrubbing off tombstones and clearing away brush.

Most recently, Fred Smith in late May hired the services of 250 goats from a man in Edwall to eat the dense brush. The goats uncovered several graves that had been overgrown.

The group is looking for more people, descendants or not, to join them, as the cemetery still requires countless hours of work before it is restored.

Friends of the Lone Pine Cemetery are currently working with the state Department of Archaeology to have their non-profit status changed to historic cemetery.

If the state grants them this status, they will be eligible to compete for state or federal grants for cemetery preservation.

Lone Pine is not included in a cemetery district which produces tax revenue.

For more information, contact JoAnn Savitz:

[email protected].