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more photosKeith Snyder handles a broken tombstone at Prineville’s Juniper Haven cemetery, where he researches the histories of people buried there and replaces damaged gravestones.
Rob Kerr / The Bulletin
Unraveling history
With old gravestones, ‘there’s always a story’
By Erin Golden / The Bulletin
Published: March 15. 2008 4:00AM PSTCrook County volunteers are hard at work replacing the crumbling tombstones of area pioneers. Along the way, they’ve discovered long-ago tales of politics, poverty and even a possible murder.
PRINEVILLE —
Emely Powell was just 11 years old when she was buried on a hill with a view of the buttes that now bear her family’s name.
Her simple gravestone, engraved with the date June 9, 1871, is now cracked and eroded, sitting in two pieces on the tree-lined property that has become Juniper Haven, Crook County’s largest cemetery. Unlike many of the other approximately 6,000 people laid to rest in the cemetery grounds — including tire magnate Les Schwab, whose impressive, flower-decorated grave is just a few rows away — Emely’s life and death are a mystery.
But this spring, 137 years after the young girl’s death, a group of avid Crook County historians are on the case. They’ll dig through old census data, diaries, business records and letters, and search for family members with information about the young girl’s story. And once they’ve tracked down every lead, they hope to commission a new, sturdier gravestone that will help to ensure that Emely Powell is not forgotten.
The project will be the sixth of its kind since 1997, when a few members of the Crook County historical and genealogical societies joined together to replace the dilapidated gravestone of Rueben Striethoff, the first settler buried in Juniper Haven, in 1870. Since then, they’ve uncovered tales of early Central Oregon politics, poverty and even a potential murder.
They’ve also placed new gravestones to mark the final resting places of several important local pioneers.
“There’s always a story,” said Frances Juris, 90, one of the group’s leaders. “Beneath every one of these stones, every person has a story, and we’d like to see them preserved.”
Pioneer graves
Founded in 1882, Crook County was home to many of the region’s earliest settlers, and most activities were centered around Prineville, the only major town within a staggering 10,000-square-mile radius. Residents buried their relatives and friends in small plots scattered across the county, marking some with stones and leaving others unmarked and unrecorded.
Today, the county is home to 10 cemeteries considered historic by the Oregon Commission on Historic Cemeteries, the arm of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department that tracks burials that took place before Feb. 14, 1909, the 50th anniversary of Oregon’s statehood. Four of those cemeteries — Juniper Haven and Howard cemeteries in Prineville, Maury Cemetery in Post and Beaver Creek Cemetery near Paulina — and one other, the Powell Butte Cemetery, are managed by the Crook County Cemetery District, district Manager Allen Bidiman said.
Across the state, more than 650 cemeteries have met the requirements for a historic designation and many are beginning to receive more attention than they have in a long time, said Kuri Gill, the commission’s historic cemeteries coordinator. She said more people are now digging into their own family’s past with online networking and resources, and becoming interested in the stories of the people who helped shape their communities.
“The (interest in) genealogy has made regular people’s history a little more important,” Gill said. “It’s not just the founders of the town — everybody dies, and something happened to these people. They may have had (grave) markers at one point, and they may not have, and that’s part of the story, the whole community’s story.”
Mysteries at Juniper Haven
So far, the Crook County historians have focused their work on Juniper Haven, which stretches across 38 acres on the north side of Prineville. Juris, a longtime Prineville resident and author of several books on local history, said she began the work more than a decade ago because of her own curiosity about the man buried beneath Juniper Haven’s oldest marker.
For the project with Striethoff, who came to Central Oregon from Linn County and was the first to be buried in Juniper Haven, Juris recruited a few like-minded friends. They combed through the archives at the Bowman Museum and met with Bidiman and the cemetery district’s leaders, who gave the OK — and some financial support — to place a new stone for Striethoff’s burial site with his name and information on one side and a note about his gravestone being the cemetery’s first on the other.
Gill, of the state commission, said individuals and organizations in various communities have gone about researching and repairing cemeteries in different ways, from simple grounds maintenance to full-fledged replacement of missing or damaged stones. In designated historic cemeteries, tampering with markers of any kind without permission is a crime, but repairs can be made with the permission of family members if they can be contacted. If no relatives can be contacted, groups can ask cemetery management to do work on a particular burial site.
In Prineville, the group working at Juniper Haven has taken those instructions seriously, making dozens of phone calls, writing letters and visiting archives in other parts of the state to track down anyone with an interest in or a connection to their mysteries. In their five major projects, they’ve completely removed just one gravestone, which is now at the Bowman Museum.
Retired science teacher Keith Snyder, 73, has worked with Juris on several of the gravestone projects. He said he pursues each project with the care and caution required in a science experiment because of the lasting impact of historical work. Snyder has written three books on the business history of Prineville and said he recognizes many of the names on the gravestones in Juniper Haven.
“The problem with historical research is that a lot of historians look at other people’s work — if you make a mistake, it gets passed on and it’s really easy to make a mistake,” he said. “You want to do as good of a job as you can.”
Among the group’s biggest challenges have been locating two unmarked graves: those of B.F. Nichols, a pharmacist, lawyer, sheriff and county treasurer who Juris calls “the father of Crook County,” and John A. Brown, the first black homesteader in Central Oregon, who was buried without a gravestone in the “paupers” section of Juniper Haven.
To unravel Nichols’ story, the group’s research led them to more than a dozen people across Oregon and beyond. In the end, the answer was in a yellowed letter that had been passed on to a woman in California whose husband was one of Nichols’ descendants. After more than a year of painstaking work, the group was able to locate the grave based on information in the letter, which revealed that Nichols was buried next to his daughter, Minnie May Holbert, whose Juniper Haven gravestone was marked.
Unlocking that secret, Juris said, was one of the most exciting discoveries she’s made so far.
“It was just ‘eureka!’” she said, remembering when she found the information. “That was the main point of all of my research, really, and just to find it in that one little tiny sentence in all the material I’d been reading was really a high point.”
Sharing the past
Some of the stories uncovered at Juniper Acres have been dramatic.
In 2006, the group replaced the gravestone of 27-year-old Stephen Staats, who died after being shot in Powell Butte in 1884. Accounts from the time vary; some locals thought Staats had been gunned down by vigilantes, while others believed the young man had taken his own life. A letter written by a Staats friend, Sid Stearns, who was on the property at the time of the shooting, called it a “sad accident,” noting that just minutes before, Staats had been acting as “lively and jolly as ever.”
Others, like Jerome Lafollett, who died at age 53 after a fall from a hay wagon, have been less sensational, but according to Carol Surrency, the president of the nonprofit Oregon Historic Cemeteries Association, no less important. Cemeteries, she said are becoming more and more of a historical resource and keeping gravestones in good condition is essential.
“My personal feeling is that everybody had an interesting life, and the people that were buried (in historic cemeteries) did such amazing things,” she said. “They touch our lives in ways we can’t imagine. We wouldn’t be where we are now without the decisions they made, and the things they were able to do, and we should respect and cherish their memory … cemeteries are really outdoor museums.”
The group has shared much of its information with the historians at the Bowman Museum, said its assistant director, Steve Lent.
“It’s a pretty remarkable effort,” he said. “Two of their (projects) were buried without headstones at all, and they were very prominent people. If it hadn’t been for them searching, trying to find where they’re buried, they never would have been found.”
Snyder said he doesn’t know yet if this year’s projects, Emely Powell and another young woman, 18-year-old Minta Thompson, who died of typhoid fever in 1876 and whose tombstone is pictured on Page A1, will turn out to be exciting stories or simply sad tales of people who died too young, as many early settlers did. In either case, he said preserving their gravestones — one of the last links to their life and death — is important for the entire community.
“I think of (gravestones) as a record,” Snyder said. “And if that erodes, and you don’t catch it before it’s lost, it’s lost forever.”
Erin Golden can be reached at 408-2836 or at egolden@bendbulletin.com.
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