A grave situation
Herbert “Curley” Bambino, a fighter pilot in World War II, never forgot a fallen war veteran and never wanted his son, Rodney, to forget either. The father was constantly pointing out the war dead in Spokane cemeteries as the two drove through the city – and not just the 20th century vets. He always remembered the weedy, trash-ridden Civil War graveyard at Market Street and Hawthorne Road between Hillyard and Mead.
“Whenever we’d go camping, we’d be driving up Market. He’d say, ‘That place is filled with more of our fallen comrades,’ ” Rodney Bambino recalled recently.
It didn’t matter that the Union soldiers fought nearly 80 years before Herbert Bambino did. They were comrades. When his son needed an Eagle Scout project, Evergreen Cemetery – the subject of all those car rides – was the obvious choice.
Herbert Bambino is dead now. The son still thinks about the cemetery and his father whenever Market Street fills his windshield. The view is disturbing. Piles of trash still plague Evergreen Cemetery, despite myriad efforts to rescue the graveyard. There are busted televisions, rotten clothes and even used toilet paper littering the graves, many of which lack headstones and are deeply caved in.
A massive utility tower rises over the graves of the 28 Civil War veterans, and the air cackles with electricity. The silk flowers that Rodney Bambino and the Scouts of Troop 226 decorated the area with 20 years ago are still there, as are the bullet holes and busted tombstones. The most recent burial is dated 1961, but most predate it by 20 years or more.
A victim of absentee landlords and even grave robbers, this cemetery has teetered on the edge of ruin for more than a half-century. Evergreen Cemetery was opened by the Hillyard Masonic Lodge in 1909 and quickly filled with Civil War veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, 28 of whom are honored with a bullet-riddled monument. The GAR was the American Legion of its day, an Illinois-based fraternity of Union soldiers that secured pension benefits for most veterans, previously paid only to the war wounded.
GAR veterans, numbering 400,000 in their prime, according to M.R. Dearing’s “Veterans and Politics,” are credited for nationalizing Memorial Day so the country’s Civil War dead wouldn’t be forgotten.
The veterans of Hillyard’s Nathan P. Gregg Post No. 127 were forgotten fairly quickly. The post forfeited its 16-year-old charter in 1925 because only 11 members were still alive, though its women’s auxiliary, comprising mostly wives and daughters, numbered 80.
Caring for the cemetery became the widows’ task. The 14-acre parcel was still owned by the Hillyard Masonic Cemetery Association, but no one kept a close eye on the property.
Vandalism increased, and there was even an occasional exhumation of a corpse.
The Masons tried to sell the cemetery to the Ball & Dodd Funeral Homes, which took possession of the graveyard and opened a 500-lot section south of where the veterans lay. The funeral home filled the area with the dead wards of the Old-Age Pension League, an early public assistance program for the poor elderly.
The cemetery for the poor, called Rest Haven, is the most damaged section of Evergreen today. Sinkholes mark gravesites, which decades ago had their headstones uprooted or broken off when the area was logged.
A snarled thicket of 8-foot ponderosa pines blankets the graveyard. To see the graves, one has to wade into the trees and peer down though the brush at the spongy layer of pine needles below. It is like searching for pebbles in a cloudy river bottom.
“When I saw it, I just wanted to stand and cry,” said Maggie Rail, a local cemetery historian. “They’ve used it as a dump yard. There’s junk all over. The owner is supposed to take care of that.”
Rest Haven didn’t last long, Rail said. Ball & Dodd’s stake in the cemetery was never clear, and it eventually backed out. A 16-year-old property rights investigation by the Spokane County assessor indicated that the Masons kept an interest in the neglected cemetery until 1955, when the Spokane Evergreen Cemetery Association sued the Hillyard Masonic group for ownership rights.
The association won ownership about the same time that news articles began appearing about the GAR women’s auxiliary; the widows and daughters of the veterans had grown too old to care for the cemetery. Vandals had ripped out the cemetery gates and torn down the fence surrounding the Civil War veterans.
The Boy Scouts came to the rescue, launching a whirlwind cleanup project, and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center got involved, promising perpetual care thereafter.
Maybe the promised upkeep stopped because the Spokane Evergreen Cemetery Association lost control of the graveyard. A contractor, Edward C. Hoover, sued the association over $916 worth of unpaid work he had done at Evergreen and received the cemetery as payment. About the time Hoover took over, locals said the cemetery was extensively logged.
Hoover sold the business in 1968 to a Cheney furniture restoration company, Astrolite, owned by William Hoblin, now deceased. His wife – Vada R. Hoblin, 71, of Las Vegas – owns the property today. Vada Hoblin has repeatedly declined to talk about Evergreen Cemetery. Her legal representative, David Richdale, did not respond to phone calls last week.
Red flags went up in the Hillyard community in 1989 after Hoblin listed the 14 acres on which the cemetery sits as prime industrial real estate. The asking price was $180,000.
Hoblin took the land off the market, but the firestorm surrounding the sale couldn’t be quelled. The state Legislature got involved, creating laws threatening the tax-exempt status of abandoned cemeteries. A state land swap was briefly discussed but fell through.
North Siders in the late 1980s, interested in the cemetery, discovered more damage than just motorcycle trails and garbage piles. The Bonneville Power Administration had dug through some graves while installing power towers through the area. A witness to the damage told The Spokesman-Review 15 years ago that a shinbone could be seen poking out of a casket broken open by Bonneville’s heavy machinery.
Public outrage crested after a father and son caught a Seattle hairdresser stealing a Civil War veteran’s skull on a rain-soaked night in May 1990. Investigators also found that other vandals had stolen war medals from a grave.
Fueled by anger, community support for saving the cemetery was high, but it fizzled by 1994.
“We were really making progress, and then we went through a slump when a lot of the active people became inactive,” said Dixie Stewart, who started a save-the-cemetery group 16 years ago after locating her grandmother’s grave in Evergreen. “I have thought about it a lot and feel bad about leaving Grandma there.”
Enough time has elapsed that a new generation of citizens concerned about the cemetery is cropping up, and they know little or nothing about Stewart and her group.
On Saturday, Stewart said she found members of VFW Post 1734 at the cemetery trying to get it presentable for Memorial Day today.
Rail is trying to identify all the people buried at Evergreen and Rest Haven. She’s up to 379 and is convinced there are more graves to be found.
John Wyman, a local Mason, would like to see the cemetery bought back by the Shriners and the region’s Masonic lodges. He wrote Hoblin roughly a year ago to check her asking price, which was in the $180,000 range – more than Wyman had in mind.
“If it had been a reasonable price, I would have approached all the Masonic lodges in the area and then conned them into bringing it up to snuff,” Wyman said. “What we dream of is getting an association formed and bringing it back to life.”
But the asking price isn’t going down. It’s going up, as indicated on eBay two years ago, when a 14-acre cemetery zoned for manufacturing in Spokane was posted for auction by a Nevada seller identified only as “wavevadave.”
The contact for all interested bidders was David Richdale, Vada Hoblin’s legal representative.
The minimum asking price was $195,000. There were no takers.