Buried under a small crumbling stone next to his family's monument in Washington Lawn Cemetery, are the remains of a World War I soldier, John Erskine Laraway, 27.
Because he passed away from pneumonia on Sept. 6, 1919, after the Armistice, awaiting shipment back to America, his name was left off the official World War I memorial in downtown Centralia. John had been an actor/singer in Vaudeville companies on the West Coast before the war and served honorably in the Medical Corps.
Please think of John Laraway this September,
his life cut short in France.
