A long-sought memorial honoring hundreds of Chinese immigrants and people with mental illness whose graves were paved over is coming to fruition
S ixteen years ago, officials discovered what some people had long suspected: a neglected corner of Southeast Portland’s Lone Fir Cemetery still held human remains.
Now, after more than a decade of community advocacy, hundreds of Chinese immigrants and psychiatric patients will finally be honored with a memorial garden.
The Lone Fir — named for a still-standing Douglas fir in its northwest corner that has since been joined by more than 700 other trees — is one of Portland’s oldest continuously operating cemeteries. Those buried there include Thomas Dryer, the first editor of The Oregonian; Oregon physician and activist Dr. Esther Pohl Lovejoy; and Portland founder Asa Lovejoy, who lost the famous coin toss that would determine the city’s name.
Also buried at Lone Fir is Dr. James Hawthorne, who opened Oregon’s first psychiatric hospital just a short walk from the cemetery. The Hawthorne Asylum, also known as the Oregon Hospital for the Insane, occupied 75 acres between what are Ninth and 12th avenues and Hawthorne and Belmont streets. It operated between 1861 and 1883.
By the time the state opened the Oregon State Insane Asylum, now known as the Oregon State Hospital, in Salem, more than 300 people had been hospitalized at the Hawthorne Asylum.
Most lived with mental illnesses, but some would now be described as intellectually disabled. There’s also evidence that people with physical disabilities, such as blindness or mobility issues, were hospitalized at Hawthorne.
One wing of the hospital was also a poor farm — a county-run facility that provided housing and work for able-bodied people in poverty.
“It had to be big because there was no Sysco at the time. The people who ate there had to grow food,” Jason Renaud, co-founder of the Mental Health Association of Portland, told Street Roots.
Hawthorne offered what he called “moral therapy” in a clean, well-ventilated facility, earning acclaim from progressive reformer Dorothea Dix.
And when patients died, if they couldn’t afford to be properly buried, Hawthorne paid for them to be buried at the southeast corner of Lone Fir — near what is now the intersection of Southeast 20th Avenue and Morrison street.
The graves weren’t marked, but Renaud said his organization has located records for about 290 patients who were buried at Lone Fir.
“Our whole concept of charity is very different then than it is now,” Renaud said. “It didn’t exist in the 1860s and 1870s. You were on your own. You came out (to Oregon) because you sort of agreed to a social contract of taking care of yourself. Getting help was quite rare.”
After the Hawthorne Asylum closed and its living patients were moved from Portland to Salem, the section of Lone Fir now referred to as Block 14 — where asylum patients were buried — began filling with the bodies of another marginalized group.
•••
Researchers estimate that between 1891 and 1928, more than 1,100 Chinese immigrants were buried at Lone Fir.
Most worked to build the city’s early railways, said Marcus Lee, who serves on the board of the Oregon Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. Others worked as brickmakers.
“We don’t know their individual stories, unfortunately,” Lee told Street Roots.
Most were eventually disinterred and sent to China.
“The tradition was that they would be re-interred in their home villages,” Lee said.
Lee said there were two large disinterments: one in 1928 and another in 1948. He said there isn’t an accurate count of how many were exhumed, but each shipment involved hundreds of bodies.
By the time Multnomah County erected a facilities-services building, often called the Morrison building, on the site in 1952, officials believed that all the bodies there had been removed from the site.
That turned out not to be the case.
In 1997, the county transferred the cemetery to Oregon Metro but retained Block 14 and the Morrison building.
In 2004, Multnomah County began investigating the possibility of demolishing the building and transferring Block 14 to Metro — and that’s when community advocates got involved.
Rebecca Liu, then a Chinese teacher for the Oregon Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, found a ledger in the association’s basement listing individuals whose bodies were removed and sent to China.
But she also discovered that at least 15 Chinese immigrants had been buried at Lone Fir and were not removed.
“Typically it would be men only. Women and children would not be disinterred. That’s according to custom,” Lee said.
In 2005, at the urging of community advocates, the county hired Archaeological Investigations Northwest to perform some excavations.
Initially, they found shards of pottery and pieces of headstones that had Chinese writing on them. But after several days of digging, they found human remains.
“It was so emotional when remains were found. I think all of us were waiting with bated breath,” said Mary Faulkner, who got involved with Friends of the Lone Fir Cemetery in 2004 after hearing about the likelihood there were still human remains under the Morrison building.
“At that point, it becomes a protected site,” Lee said.
•••
I n 2007, Multnomah County transferred Block 14 to Metro; the Morrison building was demolished in 2005.
In February of that year, Metro convened a workgroup to talk about the future of Block 14. Later that year, Street Roots reported that mental health advocates had also begun advocating for a memorial for Dr. Hawthorne’s patients.
Renaud said his organization had begun thinking about such a memorial as early as 2004, when advocates began talking and writing about the patient remains at the Oregon State Hospital .
“We’d always known that there were remains there,” Renaud said.
Metro hired Portland-based Lango Hansen Landscape Architects to create a design for a memorial garden, but plans stagnated due to staff turnover, a recession and lack of funding.
By 2011, Faulkner and others had formed their own group, Lone Fir Cemetery Foundation , to raise funds for a memorial.
John Laursen, one of the founding members of the organization, said the group raised about $30,000. This fate of any memorial to the historic and human significance of the site remained in doubt.
Then, in 2019, voters approved Metro’s $475 million parks and nature bond , making it possible to finally fund projects that had long been on the agency’s back burner.
Nicole Lewis, the project manager for the memorial garden, said Metro has budgeted $4 million for the project. Its estimate for the garden project is $3.5 million, “but those are very low-confidence numbers.”
Construction for the project — which is now being called the Lone Fir Cultural Heritage and Healing Garden — is not likely to begin before 2025, according to a timeline document generated by Metro and the Lone Fir Foundation and obtained by Street Roots.
In June, a new project manager will step in to oversee the project, though Lewis said she intends to stay involved after the transition.
The original design will be revisited with additional input from the Chinese-American and mental health communities.
The design generated by Lango Hansen was created with community input and reviewed by a Feng shui master who pointed out that, from above, the memorial is shaped like a boat facing toward the Pacific Ocean.
“It’s representing these souls going home. It was not designed with that symbolism, but that’s what he saw. It reinforced to us that this was a good design,” Faulkner said.
Advocates also want to create a garden that re-creates the type of environment Hawthorne created for his patients, she said.
“It’s a blended story that’s kind of hard to show the common ground,” Faulkner said.
But Hawthorne’s patients and the Chinese immigrants at the site have several things in common, Faulkner noted: Most died without family around; their graves have no remaining markers that descendants can visit; and both were marginalized during times when discrimination was rampant, especially in Oregon.
The two communities are also not mutually exclusive. In the 2013 book “Inside Oregon State Hospital: A History of Tragedy and Triumph,” Diane Goeres-Gardner writes that according to federal census records, in 1880 there were 285 inmates at the Hawthorne Asylum. Most were white men — records list 204 men total, just one of whom was Black — but 20 were Chinese men, and one was a Chinese woman.
Renaud is aware of three or four people who are listed in the patient graveyard who are not listed by name, but by an anti-Asian slur that was common at the time. But he wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are more.
“I think there’s probably a lot of people buried in Dr. Hawthorne’s common grave that aren’t on the list. He had a hole going,” Renaud said. “There just weren’t any other people around here at that time who had education and resources to give to the public. I imagine all kinds of people showed up in all kinds of situations asking for help.”
The challenge moving forward will be keeping the advocacy going, Renaud said, as many of those involved in the first conversations are aging and dealing with failing health.
“These are the forgotten people — the Chinese workers and the asylum patients,” Lee said. “Their stories need to be told. It’s been 15, 20 years. We think everybody’s waited long enough.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated the Morrison building was demolished in 2008. It was actually demolished in 2005. Street Roots regrets the error.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots . Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today .
© 2021 Street Roots. All rights reserved. | To request permission to reuse content, email editor@streetroots.org or call 503-228-5657 , ext. 404.
