A Pioneer - Seattle, WA
N 47° 37.973 W 122° 18.995
10T E 551340 N 5275724
This pioneer grave was re-interred multiple times before finally calling Lake View Cemetery home.
Waymark Code: WMVBYN
Location: Washington, United States
Date Posted: 03/29/2017
Views: 3
Lake View Cemetery contains over 31,000 internments and was established in 1873. I noticed this small, marble grave while taking pictures of multiple headstones throughout the cemetery. The inscription made me curious as to who this person was. After a quick online search I was able to locate a blog site containing an
article by the author who also shared the same curiosity as mine. His blog reads:
Tombstone Tuesday: Lake View Cemetery, Seattle, Washington
Incorporated on October 16, 1872 as the Seattle Masonic Cemetery, it later changed its name to Lake View Cemetery in 1890. The cemetery is located on the top of Capitol Hill with stunning views of the Cascade and Olympic Mountains, and Lake Union and Lake Washington.
Members of the Denny Party had moved from Alki Beach [today’s West Seattle] to the western shore of Elliott Bay [modern-day Seattle] in the spring of 1852, and official plats were not submitted to form the official town of Seattle until 1853, so this unnamed burial truly would have been one of the original pioneers. Though his [or her] original burial doesn’t seem to fit into the several known earliest Seattle cemeteries – the first recorded burial at Denny’s Hotel Cemetery was in 1853 (about 20 bodies were buried here, then later removed to the Seattle cemetery); the first recorded burial at Maynard’s Point Cemetery was in 1854 (whose bodies were moved to Seattle Cemetery in 1864); the first recorded burial at the Little White Church Cemetery was in 1856 (whose bodies were moved to Seattle Cemetery). The bodies from these three early cemeteries were moved to the Seattle Cemetery in the 1860s. But when Seattle Cemetery was turned into Denny Park in 1883, those bodies were again moved to Washelli Cemetery [named after a Makah Native American word for “west wind”]. Yet a few short years after the founding of Washelli Cemetery, Seattle converted the grounds into a park called “Lake View Park”, then re-named Volunteer Park in 1903, causing the bodies buried in Washelli to be removed to other cemeteries, including Lake View Cemetery. This therefore caused some families within the course of a few short decades between the 1850s-1880s to have to rebury their deceased loved ones for the fourth time. So someone cared enough to spare the expense of placing a gravestone over the site of this pioneer whose body was likely moved several times before arriving at Lake View Cemetery, despite not knowing his [or her] identity. If anyone out there knows more about this mystery pioneer, I would love to learn more details.
Since the name and origin of this pioneer's FIRST burial is unknown, it can only be assumed that this person was truly one of the very first people to settle in Seattle and one of the first to die -- A mystery of this individual's identity that may never be solved.