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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883
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Woodlawn’s revival

Marker engraver Carl Ellis sandblasts a replacement grave marker for Woodlawn Cemetery in the shop at Fairmount Memorial Cemetery in north Spokane. Old wooden markers erected at Woodlawn by SCOPE members are being updated with stone markers. Fairmount Memorial Association expects to break ground on a columbarium at Woodlawn by midsummer. (Liz Kishimoto / The Spokesman-Review)
Staff writer
Marker engraver Carl Ellis sandblasts a replacement grave marker for Woodlawn Cemetery in the shop at Fairmount Memorial Cemetery in north Spokane. Old wooden markers erected at Woodlawn by SCOPE members are being updated with stone markers. Fairmount Memorial Association expects to break ground on a columbarium at Woodlawn by midsummer. (Liz Kishimoto / The Spokesman-Review)

The cemetery down the street from Wendy Kiourkas’s Edgecliff home was both an eyesore and an obsession. Cars had crashed though its chain-link fence. Its tall nap of noxious weeds and unkempt grass was brown by midsummer and a neighborhood fire hazard. All but a few of its headstones were gone. Rumor had it that the majority of the cemetery’s grave markers were wooden and burned beyond recognition in forest fires decades earlier.

“Everybody in the neighborhood that I talked to thought it was a pet cemetery,” Kiourkas said. “It was just an overgrown field.”

Woodlawn Cemetery is no longer an overgrown field. Months and years of community cleanup barbecues transformed the cemetery into something respectable. Now a nonprofit organization that took over the graveyard is moving Woodlawn one giant step forward.

This summer a four-walled columbarium will be added to the cemetery. The new tenants, who will pay to have their cremated remains placed in the wall, will provide Woodlawn with much needed cash flow for maintenance.

“Our intention is to make something the Edgecliff neighborhood will be proud of,” said Duane Broyles, president of the Fairmount Memorial Association. “What we’ve designed are four individual walls on a large, round patio with a bench in the center. The fronts are gorgeous brown and gold mahogany granite. The sides will be brick”

An observation bench in the center of the columbarium will be dedicated to Sally Hodl, a former vice president of Edgecliff SCOPE, a community policing organization credited for cleaning up Woodlawn and the surrounding neighborhood.

“Her final wish was that she be laid to rest there,” said Kiourkas of Hodl, who died Dec. 30, 2003 at age 67.

Fairmount is inscribing stone grave markers to replace wooden ones erected by SCOPE members over the last five years. The group expects to break ground on its columbarium by midsummer, Broyles said. In the fall, when Edgecliff holds its annual walk against drugs, violence and crime, Fairmount will have a ceremony commemorating the new columbarium.

Woodlawn’s road to respectability has been more than seven years long, so long ago that Kiourkas no longer lives in the neighborhood. In 1998, when Kiourkas was living in Edgecliff and very active in cleaning up the neighborhood, she began poring over library books and newspaper clippings for mentions of Woodlawn Cemetery.

An elderly neighbor, whose mother once looked after the cemetery, filled in the details that books and magazines could not. Another neighbor, Josie Zeller, came forward with the only known key to the cemetery’s locked gate and stories about how the community had tried over the years to keep Woodlawn decent.

“We took care of it through the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts,” Zeller said. “There was no lawn to mow because there was no water.” Later, the community’s drive to clean up Woodlawn was fueled by monthly neighborhood barbecues.

Kiourkas discovered there were more than 100 documented graves in Woodlawn. Many of the buried were children, who the researcher suspects died during a tuberculosis outbreak decades earlier. A tuberculosis sanitarium, a sprawling brick complex now occupied by Park Place Retirement Community, was a few blocks away.

Maggie Rail, a Spokane cemetery guru who hosts an online database of cemeteries across the world, said Woodlawn’s roots extend to 1888, when it was started by the Southern Methodist Church one year before Washington attained statehood.

Later, the cemetery changed hands to the Corbin Park Methodist Church. It was renamed Woodlawn.

Two fires raged through piney Edgecliff, destroying the grave markers in Woodlawn. The burned markers were replaced with concrete ones by a neighborhood home economics group, said Kiourkas. The replacement markers were destroyed by vandals.

Eventually, Spokane County took control of the cemetery, but the local government didn’t take care of it. The last burial at the cemetery was in 1968.

When Edgecliff neighbors found out the county owned Woodlawn, they persuaded the government to give the cemetery to Fairmount.

Hodl wouldn’t have chosen Woodlawn as a resting place if she thought it would again lapse into neglect, Kiourkas said. A few paying lot owners should ensure the cemetery doesn’t fall apart.

“A cemetery should always be cared for just out of respect,” Broyles said.