Rehabilitation of Washington Lawn Cemetery Set to Move Forward

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Efforts spearheaded by the George Washington Bicentennial Committee to rehabilitate the Washington Lawn Cemetery are set to commence in the months to come thanks to the expected approval of two small bid awards by the Centralia City Council.

Councilors will have the opportunity to approve two contracts as part of the consent agenda during their regular meeting Tuesday night at Centralia City Hall. The city is serving as administrator of a nearly $28,000 grant awarded to the committee by the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation.

The first would be with Mudslingers, Inc. of Onalaska for about $17,000 to install a concrete sidewalk and curbing from the dirt road through the cemetery to and around the Washington family plot. The second, a $9,900 contract with Centralia Monuments, accounts for cleaning and turning the seven Washington family headstones and obelisks to face the same direction. 

Two granite monuments matching the inscriptions on the obelisks will be added to the display.

“The goal is to clean it up and make it more accessible for people,” said Emil Pierson, community development director for Centralia. “The (George Washington) Bicentennial Committee has done a good job designing it. We as the city are just administrating it, making sure it meets all the state requirements for putting bids out, wages, things like that.”

Pierson expects the concrete work to commence relatively soon once the ground dries out from the ongoing deluge of winter weather. Work on the monuments may take a bit longer to become visible, but it all must be done and invoiced by June 30 to be eligible for reimbursement by the state.



The bicentennial committee initially applied for enough grant money to install an arch with a commemorative plaque at the entrance to the Washington family plot. The Historic Preservation Capital Grant awarded by the state doesn’t include those funds, at least for now.

“It’s still not off the table,” said Bob Russell, a committee member who has taken the lead on the Washington Lawn Cemetery project. “It depends on what funding the historical folks have at the end of the biennium. If they have money left over from groups that didn’t complete their work in time or found other funding sources, they’ve already approached us and said that if they have money left, they want to help us with an arch.”

Russell anticipates the committee will hold some sort of celebratory event marking the completion of the restoration work in June or July. He has tried to lead cleanup parties at the cemetery in each of the past two years, with mixed results.

Once the project is completed, Russell plans to focus his efforts on other community projects not related to George Washington. That said, he’ll still be out at the cemetery with his weed whacker on a regular basis.

“I was always in this to celebrate (George Washington’s bicentennial) and get the statue in the park last summer,” Russell said. “Then we got this grant and I laughed, because it meant I couldn’t quit just yet. That’s not to say the people who worked on the educational component, the artwork, the parade component of the bicentennial aren’t going to keep doing something else, but this will pretty much wrap it up for me.”