Skamokawa Spotlight: Fernhill Cemetery

The Skamokawa Fernhill Cemetery has long been a cherished site in the community. Since its inception in 1895, it has served as a resting place for an estimated 1,000 or so deceased. Most of these are residents of Skamokawa and the surrounding region, each with their own unique legacy and life story. Few, if any people alive today know the cemetery and the stories it holds as well as Kent Martin. Kent has been the board of the Skamokawa Cemetery District for at least a decade. He is a fourth-generation Skamokawa resident, a career gillnetter from 1962 to 2019, and the spouse of local historian Irene Martin.

On a recent autumn morning, Kent led a walking tour of the Fernhill Cemetery. Moving methodically from one grave to the next, he shared what he knew of each person: the person's trade, details about his or her life and character and, almost always, the person's familial ties to other residents in the area. Many of the deceased were ancestors to people alive and active in the community today and, as such, few details could be printed here. "This is a living part of our community," Kent said. "It's very much a part of our heritage."

Throughout the tour Kent alternated his focus between individual people and the historic context in which they lived. Gesturing to his own great-grandmother, Kent said, "She was a mail-order bride. Both of my great-grandmothers were mail-order brides. That surprises some people. On the one hand, it was a huge leap of faith but, on the other hand, people were hungry." The hungry people to whom Kent referred were immigrants, Scandinavians in particular, that settled in Skamokawa in the late 19th century. At that time, Northern Europe was still recovering from a centuries-long cold period known as the Little Ice Age. Widespread effects of this event included poor crop harvests and a failure of northern fisheries. As a result of this and other factors, many young Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns travelled overseas and built new lives elsewhere. Arriving at the Lower Columbia River, young men found opportunity in industries not dissimilar to the trades in which they were raised. "Most of the people that came here did a lot of what they did in the old country," said Kent. "Fishing, logging, subsistence farming. Everyone kept cows for milk, meat, and butter. Most people fished. The real cash crop was fish."

These trades of fishing, logging, and farming were prevalent throughout the stories that Kent shared. In many cases, line of work formed a defining part of a person's legacy. As Kent acknowledged graves from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he identified many men by their livelihoods. He spoke in turn of a man who worked as a locomotive engineer for Alger's Logging Company, another who dairied all his life and never married, and one who was a fisherman who lived in downtown Skamokawa. Speaking of a butcher who kept a meat market in the 1920s and 30s, Kent said, "He was quick, and he didn't like cows very much, which is a good quality in a butcher. My dad said he'd just as soon butcher a cow as milk one. I've spent enough time around cows to have a sneaking suspicion of admiration for that attitude." Pointing to a man who owned a clothing store in downtown Cathlamet, Kent said of the store, "You could buy anything from caulk boots for logging to a suit. Now you can't even buy a pair of socks in Cathlamet. That's a good example of how these communities change."

As might be expected of a cemetery tour, many of Kent's stories were tragic in nature. Speaking on the age of early settlement, he said, "The mortality at that time was quite high. It was terrible. There were diseases - scarlet fever, whooping cough - that would come through and take three or four children at a time." He paused in front of one grave and said, "I can't even wrap my head around this one. This family birthed seven children and never raised one to adulthood. It says 'Lost in diphtheria epidemic - 1888.' My dad said they buried two of them in one coffin." Kent shared other accounts where tragedies emerged of a different nature. He said of one WWI Veteran, "I knew this guy real well; one of the first guys I fished with. He was something of a war hero. They were pinned down in an orchard. They hadn't eaten anything for a day or two, so he reached up with the butt of his gun and knocked a few apples off a tree, not thinking that they had been gassed. It tore his guts up. He dealt with that for the rest of his life."

As with this veteran, many of the people buried in Fernhill Cemetery were people that Kent knew firsthand. Many more were known only by the elders of his own childhood. "People often ask me how I know all of this [and] how I can remember all of this genealogy," Kent said. "It's that I listened. I listened when old people were talking." Regarding the people that he knew personally, Kent said, "I can still hear their voices. Sometimes I talk to them. They're very much still alive to me, and they will be until I'm not." Kent is not alone in this sentiment. He told a story that a former logger - a man who is now buried in the cemetery himself - shared with him. The logger was cutting trees there at some point in the 1950s. The cemetery was undergoing expansion, and a few trees needed to be felled to make room for the new plots. As the man was preparing to drop a big spruce, Kent said, "The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He heard a voice. It was a voice he knew, and it said, 'You need to wedge the back side more, and you need to deepen that undercut, or that tree is going to come down over my grave.'"

A visit to Fernhill Cemetery can offer Wahkiakum County residents and their relatives a sense of connection to a lost friend, family member, or loved one. To any visitor to the space, the cemetery can offer a window into the past. In observing the names, years, and weathering visible on the old headstones, there lies an opportunity to reflect on the history of a place and its people. Skamokawa is forever a home to newcomers, be it in heritage, trade, or culture. Despite changes brought by the passage of time, the land and its community remain.