Dead get new respect at old cemetery

The restoration of a cemetery for the poor, diseased and marginalized of Sonoma County will be marked at a Saturday ceremony that organizers hope will also help preserve the echoes of lives that once were so anonymously disposed of.

"There are some amazing stories in here, and they're not being told; nobody knows anything about them," said Jeremy Nichols, a Sonoma County Historical Society member who has coordinated the five-year effort to restore the Chanate Historic Cemetery in Santa Rosa.

In grave No. 140: A woman whose suspicious death on Petaluma Hill Road in 1938 was announced with the local headline: "Mystery Blonde Found Slain on Highway."

In an unknown grave is Halahan Dunbar, an Irish minister whose pottery was prized by England's royalty, but who died in the county hospital in 1904.

Also in an unknown grave, Tom Wing Wong, a storekeeper and the informal mayor of Santa Rosa's Chinatown, who, because of his race, was denied burial in other city cemeteries when he died in 1918.

Such bits and pieces of lives long gone are what Nichols and other volunteers, in clearing away decades' worth of brush and poison oak, have uncovered at the cemetery.

Some are displayed along a short self-guided walking tour of 10 numbered gravesites.

The cemetery was used from 1877 to 1944, when it hit capacity. It sits on land that once housed what was known as the county poor farm, for people who depended on the county for support, as well as a hospital called the Pest House (for pestilence), for people with infectious diseases like measles, cholera and tuberculosis.

When patients died, they were buried in the Chanate Cemetery, as were people whose families couldn't afford other burial sites, or who had no family.

It was the only graveyard where Chinese, because they often weren't Christian and were considered pagans, were allowed to be buried. The cemetery, with at least 1,561 graves, holds about 100 Chinese, said Nichols.

On Saturday, members of the Redwood Empire Chinese Association will be among those to speak at the dedication. A Chinese gravesite ceremony is to honor the dead.

"It's important because the people are no longer the unacknowledged forgotten ones," said Judy Hardin Cheung, secretary of the association.

Nichols, cemeterian of the Sonoma County Historical Society, is writing a book on the graveyard and the people it holds.

Wooden headboards marked each grave until 1939, when they were replaced by cement-filled and numbered cans fixed into the ground, many of which then sank beneath the earth.

"We used a metal detector, which picked up some of the rusted cans," said volunteer John Dennison, who assisted in the process of finding the gravesites. "In some cases, it was just a matter of crawling on our hands and knees."

One of those lost gravesites belonged to Walter Guy Wilson, a landscape artist from Stewart's Point who died in 1937. His daughter, Daisy Brosseau, was at his funeral and will be at Saturday's ceremony.

Brosseau, 75, said she recalls the burial: "In my mind, I'm high up from the grave, looking down, and all I can see is people crying, and I don't know what they were crying about."

Her brother searched for their father's grave for years, said Brosseau, of Santa Rosa.

In 2005, she was put in touch with Nichols, who was able to find it.

"I'm really just so thankful, to Jeremy. Actually, he's done so much up there," she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com.