DEAD GET NEW RESPECT AT OLD CEMETERY:BURIAL GROUND RESTORED FOR THOSE COUNTY ONCE MARGINALIZED

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.