”I don’t think most folks in Walla Walla know what a historic gem we have and how much the staff cares about that gem,” said Susan Pickett.
The Whitman College Catharine Chism professor of music emerita is making Mountain View Cemetery, the jewel in the city of Walla Walla parks’ crown, sparkle even more by updating the electronic archive that details information about the 40,000 “residents” in its almost 80 acres.
To that end, she has devoted 100 hours of volunteer time each month over four years.
The city reports Mountain View, at 2120 S. Second Ave., is one of the oldest municipal burial sites in the state. It combines side-by-side cemeteries formerly owned by the Masonic Lodge, International Order of Odd Fellows, the city and the Catholic Church, according to the city’s website, shorturl.at/aXs1p.
Twelve-day-old Eva Rosaline Baker is the first to be buried there, six years before the grounds officially opened. She was interred on Dec. 17, 1854, in the family’s Baker Circle. Eva’s clan established Baker-Boyer Bank and other Walla Walla businesses.
In many cases, the archive detailing dates of births and deaths has been an inaccurate, jumbled mess.
Pickett accesses the cemetery office’s computer in what she’s dubbed the “hut,” just inside its grand South Second Avenue entry gates bordered by tall stone pillars.
“When I started, the database was very incomplete — and too many people were buried days before they died,” she said.
Scouring death certificates for every single soul buried there, she’s filled in the holes.
Now for Round 2: she’s reviewing the 2,000 score again. While death certificates provide reliable details such as when and where a person was born and died and sometimes list parents’ and spouses’ names, they can also be incomplete, in error or have indecipherable handwriting, she said.
And there’s the discrepancy issue with women, their actual ages and if the death certificates match the grave markers.
“Perhaps 10% of the time a headstone birth year will not match the death certificate, most especially for some women, who historically have lied about their ages,” she said.
In those cases, she looks for birth records on an ancestry site where she’s successful about 50% of the time. Census records also help.
“If I can’t find documentation, the headstone date wins. There are a handful of headstones where both the year of birth and the year of death are wrong; those headstones look like they were placed many years after the death of the person, so the descendants were seemingly fuzzy about the facts.”
“I suspect I have another 18-24 months for the final round,” she said.
“I had to ignore the enormity of the number and focus on the way MVC is organized — in blocks.”
It took several weeks to finish a block. She marked each completed section on her cemetery map.
“At first, it seemed like there was so much more to do, but gradually the map got filled in. I’ll never forget the day I highlighted the last section of the cemetery, excluding the Chinese section,” she said.
That final block poses serious challenges as the headstones are in Cantonese.
Pickett turned to friend Tom Wan of Los Angeles with deep gratitude for his translation and interpretation expertise.
Cantonese is read from top to bottom, right to left. Details emerge about each person, such as for retired gardener Eng, She Lou, who died at 3:20 p.m. on the 12th day of the 10th month in the “42nd year of the republic (1953).”
Eng was from Hoi Yin, Go Long Gyeung village in the Guangdong, Toi San region.
“The actual name of the person is often very different from the name they used in the United States because the Chinese Exclusion Act (of May 6, 1882) prompted them to become a ‘paper son,’ claiming to be related to a person already residing in the United States.
“Discrepancies between the date of death on the tombstone and the date of death on the death certificate are because the date on the tombstone is calculated according to the Chinese lunar calendar, rather than the Western calendar,” she said.
The Republic of China or Minguo calendar is used in Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu, Korea and Mainland China. It uses 1912 as its first year, when the Republic of China was established in Nanjing.
History has everything to do with describing the park as a multi-faceted gem.
“In the 1860s, Walla Walla had vigilantes who rounded up ‘undesirables’ and hanged them, then buried them in MVC.”
“Assassinated” reads the tombstone of Ferd Patterson, who died in 1866.
“Few were sorry that he was dead,” Pickett said.
“Another tombstone says ‘killed by the Indians.’” The first mayor of Walla Walla, Judge Elias Bean Whitman, and Whitman College’s first president, Alexander J. Anderson, are buried there. And that’s just the tip of the historic iceberg,” Pickett said.
Her process so far has revealed many such fascinating stories about the community in repose. She has presented some of those at the popular city-hosted cemetery tours offered two-three times annually.
“I don’t dress up, but several members of the staff do, telling ‘their stories’ in the voices of the deceased.”
Several Fort Walla Walla Living History troupe members also present historical figures while in character.
“Joanna Lanning, a retired MVC staff member, tirelessly organizes the tours and does a spectacular job of organizing the stories and changing up the ‘characters,’” Pickett said.
She has shared about Bessie Bidwell, who poisoned her husband with strychnine in 1927 and whose mother, after Bessie’s death, buried Bessie right next to the husband she murdered.
“The Tobin family saga came forward when I found the beautiful Tobin monument in the Catholic section of the cemetery but we didn’t have any record of Tobins buried there. A devastating fire at the Catholic Church in the early 1900s destroyed records.
“I figured out, owing to obituaries, that at least three Tobins were, in fact, buried there.”
The Tobins were embezzled and Mr. Tobin attempted to murder the perpetrator but failed. En route to the Alaska gold rush in the late 1890s, Mr. Tobin was shipwrecked. The Tobins moved to Lewiston where Mrs. Tobin committed suicide. Mr. Tobin ultimately abandoned his children.
“And there are so many other stories,” she said.
Pickett’s current research is not much of a stretch from her 37-year career.
“As a musician and a professor, I became one of the world’s leading experts on historic women composers, which involved a lot of sleuthing. I enjoyed the detective part of that venture.”
She learned about Walla Walla native and composer Marion Bauer, born here in 1882. Bauer’s two siblings, father and uncle are buried in Mountain View.
“Thus, I realized early on that the MVC database needed a lot of work,” she said.
All burial records are available with the city’s online burial search tool.
The electronic archive’s earliest iteration contained information boxes that limited the number of characters.
“Therefore, someone with a long name, like Catharine Elizabeth, would come out as ‘Catharine Elizab’ and long surnames were equally problematic,” Pickett said.
In the more modern version, she’s completed their names.
She’s had the advantage of tapping into online resources such as ancestry sites and newspaper archives.
“I can find so much more now than was possible then — accurate birth and death dates and places — and fill in the missing holes of our Walla Walla predecessors.”
After a thoroughly delightful career, she wanted to give back to the community “that has so enriched me and this project seemed like a good way to do that.”
She started work during the COVID-19 quarantine, which required security clearance with the city and access to all the original records.
She’s grateful to the office employees and grounds crew, who serve the public “in one of the most difficult times of many people’s lives — losing a loved one — and to making the cemetery a peaceful and restful place to remember the departed,” she said.
A group of veterans are dedicated to documenting the military personnel buried there.
“Sherilyn Jacobson and I work closely in this regard. If I find a death certificate issued by the Veterans Administration and if the deceased doesn’t have a military-issued headstone, I let her know. I have found, and she has further documented, several hundred vets in this way,” she said.
Pickett is understandably proprietary about the grounds where she’s devoted so much time.
“Folks who have not visited Mountain View Cemetery should take walks there. We have herds of deer, many owls and lots more wildlife. We have 75 signs by particular graves that illuminate that person’s special place in our history, even if that person was a murderer.
“Surprises? Lots. The number of German emigrants from Russia to Walla Walla is staggering. The descendants of German-Russian and Italian immigrants tend to stay in Walla Walla for generations. Perhaps half of the Italians who emigrated here were from Lonate Pozzolo, Italy, a suburb of Milan.”
All of the Chinese folks she’s completed are from Guangdong Province near Hong Kong.
“They emigrated here and they stayed, even though they were not always treated as we would wish: Chinese folks were rarely named in the Walla Walla newspapers in the 1860s-1880s, except being called ‘Chinaman’ or ‘Yellowman.’ The death certificates identify their race as ‘yellow.’
“The degree to which racism is currently conceived is blatantly obvious. Furthermore, the common aversion to thinking about death has affected burial policies and practices in a way that complicates the accommodation of grieving families.
“In short, grief is not given its due in burial practice. Which is not to criticize the cemetery staff at all, but those who are in policy-making positions do not have their boots on the ground in the cemetery. Which perhaps reflects their own death-phobia,” Pickett said.
“It has been a wonderful project for me in my retirement … and I have enjoyed every minute of my research.”
