By CARA LORELLO
Staff Reporter
Medical Lake High School teacher Terry Carver said it all started five years ago when he noticed the massive cross rising out of the grassy field off the railroad tracks along Brooks Road in Medical Lake.
He knew what he was looking at was the site of the St. Anne's Catholic Cemetery on Potter's Field, the burial ground of over 330 graves, among them city founders Andrew Lefevre, A.G. Morin, and its proprietor, Joseph Labrie. Historic records from St. Anne's Catholic Church said it was Labrie who gave St. Anne Parish—the church's original name when it was still a mission church in the late 1800s—five acres to build it. There's no entry gate or sign marking the cemetery, and the dirt road that leads to it is unmarked.
“If you walked out there yourself, you can't really see them,” Carver said of the gravesites.
With some of its graves dating back to Lefevre's in 1880, today, St. Anne's Catholic Cemetery is considered a closed cemetery, according to church records. Carver said it was formerly owned and then shut down by the Catholic Diocese of Spokane some years back.
The local parish now owns the land, and many of the cemetery headstones are either worn away, broken or long buried. Grass was overgrown and covered a lot of the five-acre cemetery where only eight burials have happened since 1980, most of them being cremations.
“The area is a very historic place,” Carver said, which left him confused as to why the cemetery was in the kind of shape he saw.
Some time later, Carver approached St. Anne's priest, Father Jack Krier, with a proposition to coordinate a volunteer rehab effort with students from Medical Lake High School to fix up the cemetery grounds.
“I'm always looking for ways to inspire kids to do something out of the norm, and thought, ‘This would be a wonderful way to teach kids something about the city's past.' They should know where it came from and why it's there,” Carver said.
Church records say some graves between 1898 and 1924 are not marked. From 1955 to 1967, it's on record that patients from both Eastern State Hospital and Lakeland Village were buried there.
When he arrived as the parish priest in 1999, Krier said the cemetery was already shut down. Every few years since, clean up crews of members from the parish go there to keep it from getting too run down. The church OK'd Carver's proposal.
“We're very appreciative that these groups from the school are taking this project on as their own for the community,” Krier said.
Carver said the plan is to have his volunteer group, made up of high school students from the MLHS Key Club and JROTC program hoping to earn community service credits, start rehabbing about 150 acres of the site, starting this fall and next spring.
“It's kind of like an archeological dig—the ground isn't firm, and the tombstones are either buried or knocked over. Our goal is to reconnoiter all of that space and get a group out there regularly to clean things up,” Carver said. So far he's assembled a 20-student work crew, and arranged for correction work crews from Airway Heights to cut away the grass on site.
But Carver explains that his plan is to offer students more than just a way to earn service project credits, as the goal is to establish a permanent schedule future classes can volunteer to ensure that the cemetery grounds get maintained.
“People need to understand why our group's pursuing this,” he said. “My hope is, by the time we get done, people will drive by there, know what they're looking at, and why our school is doing this effort.”
Cara Lorello can be reached at [email protected]
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