Buried Beneath the Stones: Part I of a two-part series exploring forgotten stories
Buried beneath the stones
the first in a series about Whitman and Latah cemeteries.
(Published first in the Moscow Pullman Daily News)
By Virginia Kyle
There’s no one left to mourn them. The only love they knew is long dead, too. The distant rooster crows his daily call on the Palouse Cemetery, but few tactile memories remain of those whose bodies were laid to rest there.
Don Myott has noticed flowers are fewer and fewer. He knows a bit about the lives behind the headstones there. Born in Moscow, he’s lived in Palouse most of his 45 years when he wasn’t pursuing his degree in agronomy from Walla Walla Community College and Washington State University.
The city’s wastewater treatment plant manager, he was lured by the stories tucked into small-town museums and cemeteries at a young age. He helps dig graves when the need is there.
The headstones, some poetic, others terse, are akin to old friends, always there on the path he walks at least seven times a year as he goes about his job.
Sometimes he just comes to visit. He likes being there, with the rolling landscape of the Palouse surrounding him for miles, for no reason at all. He pointed out the graves of people he used to give a nod to and those he knew better.
But the graves dating back to the 1800s hold a different kind of invitation.
Sleep on, sweet Della Allen and Lewis and take your rest, reads a stone graced with a tiny dove and star. God calls away when he thinks best. The children of Lewis and C.M. Sisk share a headstone meticulously documenting each day of their brief lives: Della, 8 years, 7 months, 19 days; and Lewis, 2 years, 1 month and 7 days.
While some headstones of older people define a life to each day passed, it is usually the grave of a child that seems to demand respect for the sacred nature of each moment, sweeter in the hindsight gaze.
Some inscriptions like these avoid the rhyme, like that of infant Pearl, laid to rest in 1878 at less than 2 months old: The little flower has faded, it says, the words on marble punctuated with the image of a dove.
Another headstone is that of Percy, the only son of C. & F.F. Collard. Born in 1907, died in 1925, it reads: Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away.
A bitter blend is rare. But they do exist. The small stone of 24-year-old Bert L. Brown angrily announces the young man was a victim of corporation greed.
Myott’s copy of the Palouse Republic newspapers front page of June 6, 1913 tells the tale: With his father and mother, and the young lady to whom he would have been married within a few weeks, at his bedside, Bert Brown, son of Mr. and Mrs. Leon Brown of this city, died at the Sacred Heart hospital in Spokane at 9 oclock from injuries sustained six hours before in an accident in the Northern Pacific yards, where he was employed.
Mr. and Mrs. Brown received word of the accident about 5 oclock. All trains for the day had gone and they secured the services of William Peek, who took them to the city in his automobile.
The trip was made without mishap, in quick time the parents beating death by 40 minutes and finding their son conscious and able to talk to them during the few remaining minutes that he lived.
The article goes on to explain how young Brown was crushed when a ballast car swung out, throwing him against a building.
The case is more sad, reads the Republic article, because Bert had written his father a few days earlier of his intention to quit the railroad in what would have been nine days after his accident and come home.
He was to have been married shortly and wished to take up some less hazardous line of work. It appears the young mans parents blamed the railroad and its level of safety precautions for their loss. Pallbearers at the funeral were young men, most of whom had been schoolmates.
The Browns buried their son next to a daughter, Sylvia, who also died at the age of 24, four years earlier. Their own tombstones are next to Berts.
Did they carry their bitterness to the end?
A few rows away is the white marble headstone of Mary Howell, rising skyward and graced with an etching of a sleeved wrist and hand, fingers pointing upward through a heavy curtain drawn back.
Just seven days after the story of Browns mishap, Marys death also ran on the front page of the Republic.
The headline read: Mrs. Bert Howell lightning victim first death from this cause to occur in Palouse District found dead under tree on farm was wife of pioneer farmer, and held in high esteem in neighborhood was mother of 14 children.
The newspaper reported a heavy electrical storm swept through the Palouse about 6 p.m., as Marys husband and children were in town. Bert Howell began searching for his wife when she wasn’t home, finding her lifeless body a few minutes later under a tree near the barn.
The body was still warm, and death could not have come more than 15 minutes before. The cause of death was evident, the article said.
A doctor confirmed the course of the lightning bolt: It had first struck the side of the head, leaving a slight burn, and had gone down over the front of the body, following the right leg and tearing the shoe from the front.
An inspection of the tree showed it had been struck near the top, the lightning knocking the outer bark off, making its way down the body of the tree to the lower limbs, and running out on the under side of a large limb.
It was lying under the end of this limb that the body was found, she evidently having been standing under the limb, completing the circuit to the ground, said the article.
Mary, 47, joined three children who had passed before, into the great beyond.
She had made that farm a home since she was 20, and nothing can indicate more clearly her true character, as a good wife, a good mother and a good neighbor, than the testimony of the neighbors who knew her so well and have so many good words to say of her, the Republic proclaimed.
A birdbath with artwork of swans, flecks of its original white paint still clinging, sits nestled near her headstone.
Myott thinks the dedicated women of the erstwhile Cemetery Society are responsible. They had a lot to do with how the cemetery developed, how it looks today, Myott said.
The newspaper accounts of the tragic deaths of Bert and Mary shared the front page with other stories of the day: a peculiar case of cattle stealing had law enforcement scratching its collective head.
A bakery owner was suing the city for $5,000 amid claims the chief of police beat him with a cane while arresting him for drunk and disorderly, causing him not only pain, but shame.
A young but tough Luther McCarthy’s photo faces the story of the Brown railroad accident with the caption, white heavyweight champion, who was killed by a blow dealt by Arthur Pelkey in a prize fight at Calgary.
Then there’s the surprise wedding between a prominent local farmer and a fine woman in the dry goods department of a local department store. Two more victims of Cupids Dart is the headline announcing the happy occasion.
Flowers and tears blanketed the graves those days in June 1913, graves that today see few, if any, visitors, certainly no one who recalls that summer in Palouse.
Today they are just two among the countless assorted headstones dotting the landscape in no particular fashion.
Most of them belong to people who knew each other, or whose children and grandchildren knew each other. Myott recently realized a little girl in his wife Teresas first-grade class in Potlatch is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Willhelmina and Louisa Twietmeyer.
They owned a spacious wheat farm, which they could see about a one-quarter section of if they were to stand at their gravesite today.
Children Emma, 16, and Pearl May, 5, share a headstone decorated with roses and a dove, while lambs are with Our Fred, 2 months old.
Its likely most of the mourners at the funerals of Bert Brown and Mary Howell are buried here, too.
Most of the headstones in the Palouse Cemetery commemorate a person who lived at least a portion of their life in Palouse.
Whether granite, marble or metal, they also mark an era in which people lived next to each other as neighbors, and were laid to rest next to each other as neighbors.
