Located within Eugene Masonic Cemetery, Eugene's oldest cemetery, is this zinc headstone for Philip Castleman and his wife, Iantha. Unfortunately, Philip's name plate has been removed by vandals. His wife's reads:
SPRUNG FROM HER
FETTERS AND FASTENED
TO THE SKIES.
IANTHA JANE
WIFE OF
PHILIP F.
CASTLEMAN
DEPARTED THIS LIFE
NOV. 8, 1897.
AGED 63 YRS. 11 MOS.
BLESSED ARE THE DEAD
WHICH DIE IN THE LORD
THAT THEY MAY REST FROM
THEIR LABORS.
REV. XIV: 13
Two plates are also missing from the back of this monument and I located a placard in the NW corner of the cemetery that mentions this headstone as being used as a wood stove by transients camping here! Restoration is needed. There's also a historical placard located near this grave site that reads:
15. Philip F. Castleman
1828-1913
Photographer
Plot 192
Philip Castleman was a young man when he arrived in Eugene in 1851. Evidently not satisfied with job opportunities in mining and other frontier industries, he decided to become a photographer. He traveled back to New York to purchase the necessary equipment and learn how to take pictures. He returned to Eugene and opened his studio in 1855.
Billing himself as a "photographic artist," his ad in the local paper promised potential customers the "finest pictures in every style, and with all the latest improvements." He also offered to take "all kinds of produce in exchange for our work." In his shop mear Willamette and Broadway, he produced daguerreotypes--the first commercially practical photographs made on polished silvered surfaces.
Philip must have prospered because the Castleman zinc monument, made in the East and shipped to Eugene by rail, is one of the handsomest in the Masonic Cemetery. It contains pilaster with arched panels and the Masonic symbol--a compass intersecting a square, the traditional tools of the Masonic trade. This symbol can also be found on the Skinner, Packard, Thompson, and Roney monuments.
Iantha Castleman was another daughter of Catherine Davis ("pioneer nurse"). Her first husband, Geo. W. Evans is buried in the Castleman plot. He died at age 24, in 1853. While not the earliest recorded burial in the cemetery, his is probably the oldest existing marker.
FindaGrave.com also has a bio on Philip that reads:
As a youngster, for three months out of the year Philip attended school at a log cabin school which was four miles from home, KY; he later taught school for one year at Bacon Creek, KY, ten miles from home.
On 3 May 1849, he left with a party of nineteen for the California Gold Rush, arriving Sacramento in November 1849. It was a very hard trip; seven died of cholera and Philip was ill many times. He kept a daily diary during the trip. Gold mining was a disappointment! He learned quickly that the only people that really struck gold were those supplying the miners, and he found work as a baker for $250 a month, good wages in 1849/50.
In 1851 he went to Oregon where he erected a sawmill on Bear Creek, southern Oregon. He enlisted in the U. S. Army and engaged in Indian warfare in 1853 and was severely injured. Upon leaving the hospital he was commissioned a captain, Assisstant Commissary of Subsistance. Philip returned East in the Fall of 1853 by ship and studied daguerreotyping in New York. He returned to the Northwest by ship and became a pioneer photographer. 1857 was a banner year for Phillip! He married Iantha Jane Davis, a widow with two children and bought a livery station in Eugene, Oregon, which he operated until 1865. Selling that he moved to Walla Walla, WA where he engaged in photography until 1867. (Short blank space here) Then Philip moved to Portland in 1878. Sometime after Janes death in 1897 and before the 1910 census, Phillip moved to or near his daughter's home in Berkeley, California where he lived at the time of his death. His body was returned to Eugene Oregon for interment next to his wife Jane.
Philip's diary can be viewed here.