See you at the church on Saturday?

2009 10 19_0154 WANTED:  Interested community volunteers to join the Oysterville Cemetery Association and, perhaps, to serve on the Cemetery Board.  It’s not the sexiest job in the world.  On the other hand, it isn’t very demanding either.  A concerted search has revealed minutes from our last meeting — dated 1986!   Our ‘clients’ don’t complain and, as long as the work gets done, everyone seems at peace.

Back in the early ’60s (1860s, that is) F.C. Davis sold an acre of his land to the newly formed Cemetery Association for $100.  The acre on “Davis Hill” just west of town was  to be used as Oysterville’s burying ground. For the next hundred years, the residents of Oysterville looked after the graves of their loved ones, saw to it that the unknown sailors who washed up on our beaches were given a decent burial and a place to rest for eternity, and trusted to the local mortician to keep track of things.  Except for cleaning up the gravesites (a springtime community effort) there was never ‘much doin’ in the Cemetery.

Stevens GraveThen, in the mid-’60s (the 1960s, this time) when Cecil Espy retired from his banking career in Portland and moved back here to the house in which he was born, he took it upon himself to “clean up the Cemetery grounds.”  With a small hand scythe he cut the waist-high grass that had grown around and over the gravestones and carefully brought the cemetery up to his high standard of appearance.  He gathered up the bits and pieces of deeds and sales records and the old linen map and, as he aged, began to think of the Cemetery as his own.

In the late seventies, when Uncle Cecil could no longer do the physical labor, the neighbors began to talk about the future of the little graveyard on Davis Hill.  They formed a Cemetery Association — the initial membership list looks like a roll call of those now buried on the site they so lovingly tended.  Some of us are still at it, but we are getting long in the tooth, ourselves.  It’s time for us to look for newer, younger volunteers to take over.

2009 10 19_0049With that in mind, we are holding a meeting of the Oysterville Cemetery Association this Saturday, April 9th at the Oysterville Church.   Residents of the community are urged to attend.  There are no “pre-requisites” for joining us — only a love of our quiet little ‘final resting place’ and an interest in continuing the work that was started more than 150 years ago.

Please join us at 10:00 Saturday morning (April 9th) at the Oysterville Church to help us in this important “regrouping” effort.  Oh… and in case you need a little more enticement, coffee and cookies will be served!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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