Grave Concern Private Group May Take Over County Cemetery That Neighbors Restored

Edgecliff neighbors have breathed life back into Woodlawn Cemetery.

For decades, the cemetery sat overgrown and unnoticed. Three years ago, neighbors began clearing trash, cutting weeds and researching burial records. Today, the grass is trimmed and graves are marked with white wooden crosses.

On Tuesday, the historic cemetery’s future is to be decided. Spokane County commissioners are scheduled to vote on transferring the county-owned property to a private cemetery association.

If commissioners approve, the nonprofit Fairmount Memorial Association will take over the cemetery at Thierman Road and Eighth Avenue in the Edgecliff neighborhood. Fairmount officials have promised that the association, which operates four other cemeteries in the Spokane area, will continue Woodlawn’s restoration, establish an endowment care fund and eventually reopen the cemetery for burials and cremations.

Wendie Kiourkas, who has led the Edgecliff neighborhood’s effort to restore the pioneer cemetery, which predates Washington’s statehood, expects a resurrection.

“I’m at the height of my glory that it might finally reopen,’ Kiourkas said. “I can’t believe it’s actually going to happen.”

Until recently, most passersby mistook the two-acre lot for an empty, overgrown field.

Kiourkas, who first noticed the cemetery 20 years ago while walking past with her sister, was determined that the dead deserved more respect than unmarked graves overgrown with weeds.

“These people lived a life. They need to be remembered,” she said. Kiourkas has spent the past three years digging through records on the cemetery and talking to lifelong Edgecliff residents, some of whom knew and can tell stories of those buried there.

She has a pretty good idea of where and when most of the burials occurred.

Some graves hold Spokane Valley pioneers. Others, adorned only with initials, memorialized young children whose full names have been forgotten. The identities of those buried in a dozen of the graves are completely unknown.

Edgecliff SCOPE volunteers informally adopted the cemetery three years ago. A Boy Scout troup cleared out the overgrowth. SCOPE members built crosses to mark the 112 known graves. They lobbied County Commissioner Kate McCaslin for a water spigot in the cemetery. Now, they try to water the grass and keep the weeds cut.

“Legally it (Woodlawn) belongs to the county, but it really belonged to us. We were the only ones who cared about it,” Kiourkas said.

The Southern Methodist Church originally established the cemetery in 1888. The first burials on record occurred in 1889 and the last took place in 1968. Some time in between, Woodlawn became the property of the township of East Spokane.

The neighborhood’s interest in Woodlawn persuaded the county to attempt to determine who had gained ownership of the cemetery after the township of East Spokane was dissolved in the early 1970s.

The surprising answer was that the county itself had owned and neglected Woodlawn - and possibly as many as 30 other cemeteries - for the past three decades.

“What are they going to do with these cemeteries? It’s just a dead piece of land they can’t build on,” Kiourkas noted.

The land still has life to Fairmount Memorial Association general manager Duane Broyles.

One Friday in June, Broyles and a cemetery design consultant walked through Woodlawn with Kiourkas.

“With each of our properties we want to make it a reflection of the neighborhood and give it its own identity,” Broyles said.

Landscape architect Cliff Willwerth envisioned paths inviting people into the cemetery and a stone wall to define the space. He’d like the cemetery to reflect its turn-of-the century origin.

“Part of the concern neighbors have is that they don’t want it modernized,” Kiourkas told Broyles and Willwerth.

Willwerth said cemetery managers are just beginning to realize the importance of maintaining the historical feel instead of modernizing.

“At the turn of the century, cemeteries were gathering places. On a Sunday, people would go back to visit Grandma. Most cemeteries are just getting back to that.”

The cemetery association won’t slash trees and plant a lawn, Willwerth said. It will use native vegetation and try to make the place a community green spot.

With the popularity of cremation, Broyles estimates that Woodlawn might eventually hold the remains of as many as 6,000 people.

When she dies, Kiourkas said she hopes to be buried in Woodlawn.

“My husband and I are seriously looking into it,” she said.

Kiourkas has a feeling other Edgecliff neighbors might like to be buried in Woodlawn, as well.

“A lot of people here are elderly and have been here from the get-go. A lot of those people want to be buried here.”

These sidebars appeared with the story: MORE INFO County cemeteries

Has Spokane County owned - and neglected - more than two dozen small cemeteries for the past three decades? See today’s Region section. PUBLIC HEARING

County Commissioners will hold a public hearing on the Woodlawn Cemetery at 5 p.m. Tuesday in the Commissioner’s Assembly Room of the Spokane County Public Works Building, 1026 W. Broadway.