Volunteers Busily Restoring 106-Year-Old Settler Cemetery

Scott McLean remembers journeying to the Natchez Cowiche Cemetery as a young boy and listening intently as his father recounted stories about his relatives.

Now McLean takes his two boys to the cemetery and shares the same stories.

McLean and other volunteers are restoring the cemetery, which has been plagued by sagebrush in recent years. The Natchez Cowiche Cemetery is one of the oldest settler cemeteries in the Yakima Valley, second only to Pioneer Cemetery in Union Gap, Wash.

Volunteers decided to clean up the cemetery when several elementary school students were stung by ground hornets while on a field trip there a few years ago.

“I grew up out here but I was never aware of the cemetery until my son went there on a field trip,” Randy Strait said. “I think it is important to maintain because of its historical value to the community.”

The 106-year-old cemetery 2 miles southeast of Cowiche has been subjected to vandalism and a variety of Halloween pranks, which led to previous restoration efforts.

In the 1940s, teenagers called the hilltop area lover’s lane. Cars often ran down gravestones. Teenagers took some gravestones and dumped them at a Yakima home in 1951, George Parks said.

After the Halloween incident, several local residents formed a committee to restore the cemetery. Citizens burned off the sagebrush and built a fence around the land.

Parks, who played a large role in that effort, is glad to see work continuing.

“It is good to see some people from the younger generation caring about the cemetery,” he said. “I took care of the cemetery for many years and my mother did, too.”

Hannah Slagg vividly recalls traveling to the cemetery two years ago.

“I loved going there,” she said. “It is a different place because not very many people go there. The only problem was the weeds were as big as me.”

The next time people visit the cemetery they won’t have to worry about the tall weeds. The sagebrush was burned off in July with the help of the Cowiche Volunteer Fire Department.

The restoration crew plans to create concrete markers stamped with family names for the 45 graves without markers. Some were originally marked with wood planks and the writing has vanished, Byron Koempel said.

The committee also intends to establish an information board with the names of people buried there. It is believed that 65 people are buried at the cemetery, Strait said.