Remembering a forgotten cemetery

It’s been a couple months since members of the Pine Tree 4H club mowed the grass at the pauper’s cemetery overlooking a fringe of trees above a road cut of Seltice Way in Post Falls.

The cemetery isn’t on a map.

Passersby, if they notice it at all, have no way of knowing the cemetery’s name except for a sign, recently renewed, on a grassy hillside.

“It’s kind of a forgotten cemetery,” said Don Pence, the 4H club’s leader.

Noxious weeds, goatsbeard and knapweed, along with the arid grasses that enjoy dry, sunshiny hillsides have shot back, growing knee-high in places since Pence, who along with members of the Post Falls club, tended to the spot of ground in May.

The leaning cemetery on a small fringe of inclined land is a hidden burial place where the interred are mostly nameless to its few visitors.

Gravesites are marked by crosses planted years ago by the club, which has for 40-plus years cared for the plot.

Members of the Pine Tree 4H club this week planted a new sign to mark the cemetery that sees thousands of cars pass daily on the old highway not far from one of the busiest intersections in town.

Its real name, according to the county archives, is Kootenai County Cemetery. It’s located 2.9 miles west of Northwest Boulevard. The land for the cemetery was deeded to the county in 1922, and the cemetery was used between 1928 and 1943.

When Alfred and Betty J. Shane of Coeur d’Alene published a book about the region’s cemeteries in the 1980s, the Kootenai County Cemetery showed just one readable grave marker.

“Most of the other graves are marked only by a metal holder furnished by the funeral home … (it) held a paper giving the name of the person buried there,” the Shanes wrote in their publication, Kootenai County Cemeteries. “Any paper in these holders has long since vanished.”

The Shanes for years searched local funeral-home records until they matched names with most of the 63 gravesites at the pauper’s cemetery. Fifty-three sites are now marked.

The names the Shanes documented include Lannings, Kindreds, Lunsfords, Whalens, Newkirks and Stoutenburgs. They were often Midwesterners who settled in Kootenai County after leaving places such as Franklin Mine, Mich., Argentine, Kan., and Hurricane Lake, N.D.

Immigrants who left Germany, France, Wales and Italy were also inhumed under tall ponderosa pines and surrounded by decorative lilac bushes and native balsamroot.

The Shanes — Alfred was a U.S. Marine veteran of World War II Pacific campaigns who met Betty at a Colorado Naval hospital — documented area cemeteries no matter how small in two volumes available at the Museum of North Idaho. The couple died in 2004 and 2013, respectively.

During their lifetime an old sign, darkly stained and rotting, graced the hillside below the cemetery.

Keera Paull, the club’s president and a Lake City High School senior, said her club decided to refurbish the cemetery’s sign because the old one was barely visible and in need of repair.

The club took the cemetery under its wing, Paull said, because no one else was doing it.

“Pine Tree has been taking care of it since 1976,” she said. “I don’t think anybody was taking care of it before then.”

Every spring since she joined the club, members have pulled on work gloves, grabbed rakes and mowers and filled trash bags with litter to spruce up the small cemetery on the hill before Memorial Day.

Pence brings a flag, snaps it to the halyard on the steel pole and hoists it up through the trees to lend a sense of ceremony.

This year, it wasn’t necessary.

“When we got here, someone had already put a flag up,” the Stimson forester and club volunteer said.

The group of volunteers made the new sign from a slab of pine, designed, carved and fastened it to poles placed securely on the hillside below the graveyard, surrounded by bunch grass.

But there is more work to be done, Paull said.

Replacing the storm fence that surrounds the plot with a real fence is among overdue projects. Removing a dead ponderosa from the middle of the cemetery is another.

“We kind of work on a shoestring budget,” Pence said.

The group isn’t short on elbow grease.

“We don’t have much for financial means,” he said.

The sign cost $170 and fit into the students’ community pride project.

Club members don’t decorate the gravesites with flowers, allowing instead native vegetation including mats of kinnikinnick, a shiny aromatic ground cover, to burst from the nearby duff.

But somebody does.

“People randomly come up every year, and flowers start showing up,” Paull said.