Historic undertaking

Who’s who guide to city's past movers and shakers found on cemetery stroll

By Anne Marie DiStefano

The Portland Tribune, Oct 30, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

The grave marker of Henry Winslow Corbett is slowly being overtaken by tree roots at River View Cemetery. Many of Portland’s famous or influential families have kin buried here.

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Death isn’t what it used to be. Just contrast the cuddly ghosts and frolicsome skeletons in stores this month with the older tradition of All Hallow’s Eve, when departed spirits were said to haunt the living.

Or walk among the oldest graves in the historic River View Cemetery to see the ritual that used to be lavished on burials. Giant obelisks rise above family plots. Massive, hand-carved granite monuments honor familiar names from Portland’s past: Pittock, Weinhard, Hoyt, Benson, Terwilliger.

“One of the things that’s changed in society is that people are putting less emphasis on what happens at death and afterwards,” says David Noble, River View’s executive director. “You can drive through the cemetery, and you can see the changes as it’s developed. It kind of went from the time when people bought these great big spires and huge monuments to the part where they became smaller. … By watching the dates on the markers you can see the progression of what was popular in those times.”

River View Cemetery was established by a dozen of Portland’s founding fathers and has been operating continuously as a nondenominational burial site since 1882.

A century and a quarter’s worth of statues and headstones are scattered over grassy, forested hillsides that rise in billows from the Willamette River west of the Sellwood Bridge. It is run as a nonprofit business that now offers funeral home services, cremation and mausoleum placement.

It’s not unusual for historic cemeteries in Oregon to continue to accept new burials, according to Kuri Gill, the Historic Cemeteries Program coordinator for the Oregon Commission on Historic Cemeteries. The commission maintains a register of historic cemeteries, which it defines as any site whose earliest burial is before 1909.

The official list currently has about 700 entries, and there are at least 500 more that need to be added, Gill says. Some of these are private plots on family farms and ranches. The majority are small community cemeteries with 40 to 90 burials.

Upkeep is a major issue for most of these cemeteries. The commission offers support for those interested in caring for historic plots by awarding small grants, organizing workshops on graveyard preservation, and providing maintenance information on a Web site (www.oregon.gov /oprd/hcd/ochc/).

By contrast, the large and well-funded River View is in no danger of slipping into oblivion.

“They’re running a 21st century cemetery that is really different from most historic cemeteries, and most of the issues are different,” says Bob Keeler, who is the Portland-area representative on the historic cemetery commission, and who teaches anthropology and geology at Clackamas Community College.

Since the beginning, he says, River View was prestigious. In its early days, the remains of prominent citizens who had been buried in the older Lone Fir Cemetery in Southeast Portland were disinterred and moved to River View.

“It became the trendy new cemetery,” Keeler says. “Building it on the west side reflects the history of Portland, as wealth and power and influence settled in the southwest portion of the city. That’s where the wealthy and the powerful wanted to be buried.”

Those who lived on the west side could only reach Lone Fir by ferry, and that impeded the stately progress of elaborate funeral corteges that were popular in the 1880s and ’90s. For an important citizen, Keeler says, these processions could have included dozens of horse-drawn carriages.

“Everybody knew each other, and we weren’t such a mobile society,” Noble says. “The cemeteries had the family plots, a bunch of people had the same last name. You can see a lot of that in the older sections.”

River View still does sell family plots, at the rate of maybe five or six a year. There also are a few new family mausoleums scattered around the cemetery; they can cost as much as a house, but, Noble points out, they hold more people.

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