Family still operating small pioneer cemetery near Cheney

The air is thick with the scent of old lilac bushes and though it’s just 15 minutes southwest of downtown, Marshall Cemetery is incredibly quiet.

There’s no water or power. No tick-tick-tick of sprinklers or the loud sounds of leaf blowers. The bushes and shrubs that survive on the dry lot have to be watered with water brought out in buckets in the back of cars.

Kathleen Sullivan Garman grew up playing among the plots and headstones, while her grandmother pulled weeds and cleaned up around the graves.

“We’d walk between the graves, and she had a story about everyone,” Garman said. “It may sound morbid to some, but we loved coming out here and my Nana absolutely loved the place.”

Since the mid-1960s, Garman’s family members have been the main caretakers and managers of the small pioneer cemetery that was founded in 1886 near Cheney.

Garman’s mother, Diane Sullivan, is now the one who puts on gardening gloves as soon as she gets out of the car.

“I just love coming out here,” Sullivan said. “Everyone is here. All our family is here.”

It was her great uncle Eligah Eldrige – a wheat farmer out near Cheney – who sold everything he owned and created a fund that was able to purchase the cemetery when Marshall township was dissolved.

“We didn’t want it to go to the county,” Sullivan said. “We’ve taken care of it ever since.”

Eldrige had one rule for whomever the future caretakers would be: “We can’t touch the principal but we can spend the interest,” Garman said.

One of the oldest graves is that of Daniel Goodsell who died in 1894. Anna Leuenberg was put to rest here in 1902 under a headstone with a verse in her native German. In 1886, Calvin died at just a year old – he was the son of A.J. and A. F. Tinsley.

Garman’s father, Pat Sullivan, said he’s always been amazed that most of the old pioneer people died around the same time.

“They lived to be 50 or maybe a little bit older, and then they died,” Pat Sullivan said. “They worked themselves to death.”

Some of the graves are well marked with big headstones, others are anonymous stone crosses pitched in the lawn.

For many years, Jole Birdsell was the records keeper for the Marshall Cemetery, but she died last year.

“We have all her records,” Garman said. “Her work really was a labor of love, very meticulous, sometimes on little pieces of paper, but everything was there.”

Anyone can purchase a plot at Marshall Cemetery so it’s not private like some smaller, rural pioneer cemeteries which were built for just one family.

Families with a lot of relatives buried at Marshall donate money and services to the little cemetery all the time.

“We are grateful for all the help,” Garman said. “The cemetery is a nonprofit. We don’t make any money; we just take care of it.”

On Tuesday, Donna Alford stopped by with Memorial Day flowers for her longtime neighbor Elois Thomas who died in March.

She’s continuing a tradition Thomas was a big part of.

“We would have all these flowers in the car and go from cemetery to cemetery,” Alford said. “There were probably 30 family graves that got a visit and she knew everyone.”

Alford said Thomas knew everyone’s favorite flowers and colors, and the two would drive from cemetery to cemetery, pausing for lunch of homemade “cemetery sandwiches and big mugs of coffee.”

She wore red and brought red flowers for Thomas’ grave.

“Red was her favorite color,” Alford said.