Lone Fir Cemetery

Lone Fir is one of Portland's oldest burying grounds and a working cemetery still. Its first burial came in 1846, on farmland then outside the young city; it was platted as Mount Crawford Cemetery in 1855 and renamed Lone Fir in 1866 for a solitary fir still standing there. Twenty five thousand people rest under more than 700 trees.

The heaviest history sits in the southwest corner. Block 14 was the Chinese section of Lone Fir, where the Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Association organized burials for a community shut out of nearly every other resting place. Metro's research found that some 2,900 people of Chinese descent were buried here. In 1948 the county exhumed 265 individuals, shipped most back to China, and paved over the parcel for county use while many burials remained in the ground. The county has apologized formally, and Metro now leads a community project for a memorial garden there.

Portland folklore holds the hillside haunted, but the living practice is quieter: grave tending, Chinese American memorial work, Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery history tours, and ancestor remembrance under the firs.

Visiting

649 SE 26th Avenue, Portland, Oregon. Open daily, 7 a.m. to sunset, free. Keep to the paths, leave stones as found, and treat Block 14 as a memorial. Operator: Metro, oregonmetro.gov/places/lone-fir-cemetery.

Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lone_Fir_Cemetery_in_Portland,_Oregon_-_138.jpg), CC BY-SA 4.0.