City’s Past Recollected At Cemetery Ceremony Today Marks Historic Preservation

Jeremiah Crabb was a 44-year-old soldier stationed near Spokane when he died of alcohol poisoning - not an uncommon event on an Army post in the West - just 10 days before the close of the last century.

Not much is known about Crabb’s life, except that he was a private with the 25th Mounted Infantry, a unit of African Americans dubbed Buffalo Soldiers. His death would be relatively unremarkable except for one thing.

He was the first person to be buried in Fort George Wright Military Cemetery, established just a week earlier by an order from Secretary of War Elihu Root.

Today, the hard-to-find, sometimes-forgotten remnant of Spokane’s past becomes a focal point for saving the community’s heritage. Above the rushing river, city and military officials will mark Historic Preservation Day with an 11 a.m. ceremony at the refurbished cemetery.

Since Crabb’s death, more than 650 people have been buried on the point overlooking the Spokane River northwest of downtown.

Privates and generals, their wives and infant children were placed below stones of simple white marble or gray granite.

As the small triangle of grass and trees filled with graves, the nation’s military went from horses to jets. The city of Spokane swallowed the wilderness that separated it from Fort Wright and kept moving north. The Army out-post became an Air Force command center that eventually moved west to Fairchild.

The graves remained, mostly in peace. Relatives and friends fought off a plan by the Army in the 1960s to save money by closing the cemetery and moving the occupants to a military facility in Portland.

The fort became a private college, then an institute for teaching American culture to Japanese students. The Centennial Trail brought curious hikers and bikers past the iron fence of the cemetery, where they would peer in to wonder about the rows of headstones.

Today as the military and local officials gather for the ceremony, they’ll stand with the ghosts of the heroic and the hapless.

Among the more notable occupants is Brig. Gen. Allen Smith, a former commander of the fort buried in the cemetery along with his wife Julia and son Charles.

Smith, who died in 1927, was appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy at 14 by President Lincoln after his father, a Civil War general, was killed. He served aboard the USS Constitution before switching to the Army. He spent six months chasing Geronimo in the Arizona desert out of Fort Apache.

Another general from a much different war is also buried there. Brig. Gen. Ray Owens, who helped lead the air war against the Japanese, came to Fort Wright when it was the temporary home to the 2nd Air Force. When the planes went to the Pacific islands, Owens’ family stayed in Spokane.

He and his wife were both buried in the cemetery in 1948.

The fort’s graves registry, now kept at the Fairchild base museum, gives scant information on most of the cemetery’s occupants.

In tight, neat script, it notes the victims of drownings and typhoid, pneumonia and tuberculosis. Babies who were stillborn, who lived a day or a week. Men who fell from bridges or crashed in airplanes. Master Sgt. James Gordon and his wife Kathleen were crushed in a railroad accident in Japan in 1949, and their bodies shipped back to the cemetery.

They lie with Pvt. John T. Reynolds, who died on Jan, 1, 1909, in a street car accident in Spokane.

Pvt. James Edwards died in 1915 “killed by a gunshot wound by Pvt. Connelly.” There’s no record of what happened to Connelly.

That same year, John Sullivan, “former cavalry soldier” fractured his skull while intoxicated. “No relatives. No friends,” the registry notes.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo