We pulled away branches, slogged through wet weeds and tripped over blackberry brambles, all in search of a grave marker on the south side of Spencer Road.
A month ago, fellow historian Michele McGeoghegan and I met with Ruth Herren to see the map she owns of the old Cowlitz Farm, which was established by Great Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Co. in the late 1830s to grow supplies for Fort Vancouver and for export. French-Canadians working for the Puget Sound Agricultural Company operated the farm. The map details crops cultivated between 1845 and 1848, with fields of 105 acres each labeled wheat, timothy, grass, clover, oats “pease,” and turnips. One large portion was listed as “manured.”
During our visit, Herren told us about the headstone on property she owns on the south side of Spencer Road on what used to be Cowlitz Farm property. The property has been in her husband’s family since Adonirum Judson “A.J.” Herren and his family settled there in the late 1880s. A.J. was the grandfather of Ruth’s late husband, Robert Herren.
McGeoghegan and I set out the next day to find the grave. Despite our best efforts tromping and scrambling through the weeds, we never stumbled upon the headstone marking the grave in what was once known as the Roberts Cemetery, or alternatively the Howe Cemetery.
The headstone marks the grave of Emma Margaret (Roberts) Phillips, the daughter of Cowlitz Farm overseer George B. Roberts and his wife, Martha, who were both natives of England. They married in 1843 and settled at Fort Vancouver in 1844. Martha (Cable) Roberts was said to be the first white woman to live at Fort Vancouver, according to The Toledo Community Story. She gave birth to a son, George Roberts Jr., in 1845, at the fort. The family moved north to Cowlitz Farm in 1846, and Martha had her first daughter, Frances, in 1848, and Emma on Feb. 15, 1850. But typhoid swept through the farm and Martha died July 27, 1850. She was only 31, and is said to be the first white woman buried in what became Washington.
Emma married J.T. Phillips Feb. 12, 1869, but she died March 5 the following year while giving birth to a son, Fred. She was just shy of 20.
According to information on files.usgwarchives.net/wa/lewis/cemeteries/roberts.txt, the cemetery also contains a grave without a marker but bound by a handmade picket fence with wooden pegs. Bob Herren, who died in 2005, had said most of the graves were moved to the Winlock Cemetery years ago, but sunken areas of the ground indicate the former location of graves, perhaps some of them those of Native Americans.
The information about the cemetery also notes that Frances Roberts was buried there. She died Dec. 10, 1867.
In his later years, Roberts lamented having to give up the graves of his wife and children to the American “squatters of ’54 and ’55,” namely Jackson Barton, Thomas Pearson, J.L. Finch, Horace Howe, and James Galloway. These men staked out donation land claims on what had been the British-owned Cowlitz Farm after the boundary between the United States and Great Britain was established at the 49th parallel in 1846.
That’s not the only place in Lewis County where bodies are buried on private property.
The Jackson Cemetery south of North Prairie Road contained about eight graves, including two of the sons of Matilda (Glover) Koontz, who married John R. Jackson. Her 14-year-old son, Felix Grundy Koontz, died Dec. 7, 1855, of what was then called “white swelling of the knee.” His older brother, Henry, drowned in the Cowlitz River June 1, 1857, at the age of 18, and he is buried nearby.
Altogether, according to a findagrave.com write-up, the cemetery on the John Kemp property contained about eight graves. Among those was Schuyler Stuart Saunders, founder of Chehalis and the husband of Eliza (Tynan) Saunders, who fell ill and died at the Jacksons’ home near present-day Mary’s Corner Feb. 4, 1861.
Vandals destroyed some of markers, and a man in October 1977 took some of the stones and built them into his fireplace. But headstones for the Jackson boys remained. Fortunately, the Lewis County Historical Museum has photos of those headstones, which I was able to include in my book about Matilda Koontz Jackson.
Years ago, while searching our property online using the Lewis County Assessor’s Office’s GIS mapping system, I discovered a cemetery district owns land at the corner of Schoolhouse Lane and Tucker Road. What? I wondered if they planned to create a cemetery near our place. It wasn’t until a year ago when I interviewed Pauline Sabin that I learned a cemetery already existed at that location, although few traces of it remain.
An idiomatic expression referred to the remotest quarter of the old 160-acre homesteads as “the back forty.”
Now I know they truly did bury their bodies on the back forty. Watch your step in the hinterlands of Lewis County.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at chaptersoflife1999@gmail.com.
