"Taking It to the Grave"

Restored wooden headstones mark the graves of a quintuple fatality on Lynx Creek in 1901. These markers stand in a well-tended cemetery
in old Sunrise, near the community of Hope.

TAKING IT TO THE GRAVE

Author’s note: Since I wrote this piece, much has changed. A new cemetery in Soldotna has filled a decades-old void … and a civic need.  While I laud the politics and the sweat that accomplished this feat, I believe that the struggle to accomplish that goal must be remembered. Here, then, is the story.

JUNE 2009

The Kenai Peninsula Borough contains 39 private and public cemeteries—a few of them sprawling and some of them petite, some of them manicured and carefully tended, others neglected and overgrown with weeds. And, with one exception, every city and community of the central peninsula has at least one cemetery.

That one exception is Soldotna.

The 2004 updated version of Cemetery Inscriptions and Area Memorials in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula Borough, by the Kenai Totem Tracers Genealogical Society, inventories 15 cemeteries in the central peninsula:

Sterling has tiny Bear’s Rest Cemetery. Cooper Landing has Cooper Landing Cemetery and St. John Neumann Catholic Cemetery. Ninilchik has the American Legion Cemetery and the Transfiguration of Our Lord Russian Orthodox Church Cemetery. Nikiski has McGahan and Monfor cemeteries. Kasilof has Kasilof Boat Harbor Cemetery, Kasilof Village Orthodox Church Cemetery, Robinson Cemetery, and Spruce Grove Memorial Park. And Kenai has Cannery Cemetery, Heavenly Meadows Cemetery, the Holy Assumption of the Virgin Mary Russian Orthodox Church Cemetery, and Kenai City Cemetery.

A patron leaves the Holy Assumption of the Virgin Mary Russian Orthodox Church Cemetery
which lies tucked in the woods near the church in Kenai.

By many accounts, Soldotna—despite its recent spate of attempts to create a cemetery and settle on a location—has not historically put “cemetery” on its priority list since incorporating as a fourth-class city in 1960.

After incorporation, Soldotna found itself as largely a patchwork of privately owned land parcels. According to Al Hershberger, a member of Soldotna’s first city council, the first land truly owned by the city was part of the Howard Binkley homestead donated by Don and Verona Wilson to become the site of the Soldotna Community Club (and later City Hall, and now the city fire department).

Within city boundaries, Hershberger said, were plots of unclaimed land, which had been withdrawn from homesteading by the Bureau of Land Management. These lands could have been claimed, via the BLM, by qualified institutions and entities, including the city.

“It was discussed: ‘Why should we not apply for these lands and get them?’ And it was just kind of pushed off and forgotten about,” Hershberger said. “And it was actually neglect that we didn’t get land that was available at the time. In retrospect, that looks pretty bad, but at the time it was not a high priority.” The real priority, he said, was “just trying to form a city.” For instance, the city government and administration were only beginning to take shape, and the city itself had no police officers to enforce the law. Consequently, one of the city’s early goals became establishing a tax to pay for the necessities.

Part of the Cannery Cemetery in Kenai.

“The very first tax that we had was a utilities tax,” Hershberger said. “I believe it was two percent on electricity and two percent on telephone. When we got natural gas, it was eventually on natural gas.”

In addition to the focus on revenue, he said, there was, perhaps, another barrier to the creation of a city cemetery: “For the people in Soldotna, I guess, speaking of death was just not something they wanted to do. I guess everybody just thought they were going to live forever. Basically there were no old people in Soldotna, and I think that had some bearing on no one having foresight for a cemetery in those days.”

In fact, throughout much of the 1950s, it was generally believed that Soldotna had only one senior citizen, one grandparent—Frances Mynarcik, the mother of homesteader Dolly Farnsworth, who settled in the area in 1948 with her husband Jack.

Soldotna had gotten its start in the homesteading push of 1947-48, and the vast majority of those settling in the area were in their 20s or early 30s. Even by 1960, few seniors called Soldotna home.

Besides, according to Mary France, who came to the area in the mid-1950s, cemetery alternatives were available when deaths did occur. “Everybody felt Kasilof was that close, and that was okay,” France said. Some were buried in Kenai, while others were interred Outside, in the communities from which they had originated.

Despite the youthful exuberance and the priorities at the time, however, the topic of a city cemetery did occasionally arise. And—ironically, in light of modern discussions of possible cemetery locations in Soldotna—one of the sites considered lay between W. Redoubt Avenue and the Kenai River.

Details of the proposal have grown hazy with time, but this much is known: Ray Girves, a local carpenter, had title to a homestead in the West Riverview Avenue area, in addition to a homestead off Robinson Loop near Sterling. According to his former wife, Irene Girves, Ray felt besieged by property taxes and sought some means to alleviate a portion of the tax burden, so he concocted the idea of donating 20 acres of his land along the river to the city for the express purpose of building a city cemetery.

Hershberger remembered that the prospect of cemetery land by the river was raised, and his recollection gibes with Irene Girves’s claim. “There was a piece of land down on the river that was discussed as a cemetery in the ’60s,” he said. “And as far as I know, nobody pushed it. I know it was discussed; people talked about it. It was briefly mentioned in city council when I was on there, and it just never got pushed.”

Long-time Soldotna resident Marge Mullen said, “Irene Girves told me that part of the Girves homestead was offered for a cemetery; however, the city administrators didn’t take them up on it at all. Nobody follows through on these things, you know.”

Girves said she was unclear on the details of the city’s rejection: “I kind of believe that he (Ray) was given the answer that, no, they couldn’t do that, that they couldn’t afford the insurance. I’d never heard of insurance on a cemetery, on a hunk of trees. It’s unbelievable to me, but it seems like that is what they told us.”

Roger Tachick, who moved as a teen-ager with his family to Soldotna in 1951, said that in the mid- to late 1960s, Burton Carver, an early Soldotna entrepreneur who was the city mayor three times, tried to interest him in a cemetery. Tachick remembered that the cemetery site in question was located between West Redoubt and the river and involved Ray Girves somehow.

“(Carver) wanted to know if I wanted to buy a plot in that cemetery,” Tachick said. “At that time I was just shortly out of the Marine Corps, and I didn’t think I needed one. But I look back in hindsight, and I wish I would have.”

Dolly Farnsworth, who has lived in the city for more than 60 years and was mayor throughout much of the 1980s, said that she never heard anything about the Ray Girves plan, and she couldn’t recall much discussion throughout Soldotna’s history concerning the creation of a cemetery.

Like many other early Soldotna settlers, she has used other local cemeteries in lieu of having one in her home town. Her husband, who died in 1967, and her mother, are buried in Kasilof’s Spruce Grove Memorial Park, easily the most popular central peninsula burial site until at least the 1980s.



A portion of Spruce Grove Memorial Park in Kasilof.

“It was sort of like a rule of thumb,” said Tim Wisniewski, the funeral director for Peninsula Memorial Chapel. “Everybody’d go to Spruce Grove, from Soldotna, and every now and then they’d use Kenai.” Since his arrival in Kenai in the mid-1970s, he said, he has filled up four sections out at Spruce Grove.

Lyle Cole, the sexton for Spruce Grove for the last 30 years, said that the cemetery had its first burial in the mid-1950s, when the community of Soldotna was in its infancy, and it currently holds more than 700 graves and has three more one-acre blocks to fill. The cemetery, which holds the remains of numerous past residents of Kasilof, Soldotna, and even Kenai, faded from popularity somewhat after the Kenai City Cemetery had a facelift in the 1980s.

According to Carol Freas, Kenai city clerk, the City of Kenai took over operation of the cemetery in 1983, and, with the assistance of Wisniewski and others, it was beautified and expanded. Eventually the maintenance of the cemetery was assumed by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. Before 1983, Freas said, the cemetery “was in fairly bad shape,” full of uncut weeds and often untended graves.

Mary France recalled that, during the 1960s, she once had a conversation about the need for a Soldotna cemetery with Burton Carver’s wife, Joyce, a local elementary school teacher and the first president of the Soldotna Public Library.

Joyce Carver, for whom Soldotna’s library is named, was murdered in Anchorage in 1966. Burton Carver, who created the city’s first school bus service, the Riverside House restaurant and motel, an early garage and filling station, and for years owned and operated the city’s only bowling alley, died in 1996. Both Carvers, so important to the history of the city, are buried in Spruce Grove Memorial Park.