Neighbors To Restore Neglected Chester Cemetery
The Chester Community Cemetery won’t be forgotten this Memorial Day.
The nearly seven-acre cemetery at 44th and Bates, founded in 1901, has fallen into disuse and neglect since the 1950s.
Now people in the neighborhood are trying to restore the site. For them, it’s not just a matter of cleaning up an overgrown plot of land. It’s a matter of honoring Valley history and the area’s pioneers.
“All these people (buried in the cemetery) are more or less pioneers,” said Rosemarie Wilson, vice president of the Chester Community Cemetery Association. “These are the people who started the Spokane Valley. … Almost everyone involved with the board has a relative buried there or is soul-connected to it.”
Trees have grown thick in the cemetery, taking the place of paths. Grave markers had been knocked over or stolen.
When spring came to the Valley this year, members of the Chester community decided enough was enough.
Valley Boy Scouts built a large, wooden flower planter at the cemetery entrance. This month, loggers from Timberline Tree Service cleared the overgrowth by logging commercial-quality trees. Chesterarea families held a pre-Memorial Day cleanup to make sure the headstones of their descendants were clean, intact and visible. On Memorial Day, the cemetery’s entrance will have fluttering above it a flag that once flew over the nation’s Capitol.
There’s still much to do, though. Association members are looking for volunteers to help clean out scrap wood, and to cut new pathways. They aren’t going to give up because the stories behind the old grave markers are too dear to them.
Wilson tells of her grandparents, William and Martha Longfield. Her grandfather came to the Valley around 1910, but his first wife died. He then courted Martha in an unconventional way.
“She was basically a mail-order bride from Kentucky,” Wilson said. “She married my grandfather sight unseen. So, she came to beautiful Spokane and raised the rest of William’s family here.”
Anna Goldsmith, who used to be the cemetery association’s secretary, is 90 years old. She grew up near the cemetery, and raised her daughter, Donna Anderson, in the Chester neighborhood. That daughter is also now an activist working to save the cemetery.
Goldsmith remembers stories about how her parents, Andrew and Augusta Johnson, came to the Valley. Swedish immigrants, they first lived in Pennsylvania before moving here.
“Union Pacific had brochures out, saying ‘Go West, seek a fortune,’ so they came out to Spokane and lived in an old house on Second,” Goldsmith said. Her parents outgrew the house, though. “In February, Dad went out in his horse and buggy with a real estate man to look at a farm two miles from Chester, and they settled there. That was in 1891.”
Wendy Johnson, current president of the association, doesn’t have relatives buried there. But she does have a grandfather, Hans Iller, who was a Valley pioneer and one of cemetery’s founders. That’s why she wants to see the place restored.
“He was one of the original board members, so I wanted to keep it in the family,” she said. “It’s going to be a nice little country-type cemetery again … we’re just going to keep it simple. But it’s going to be my resting place someday, and I want to be sure I have enough time to see the dream come true that I have for it.”