Did you know that before it was Seattle’s first city park, Denny Park was Seattle’s first municipal cemetery? Created on land donated by David and Louisa Denny, burials started in the 1860s and continued until 1884 when Mayor Henry G. Struve signed Ordinance 571 to convert Seattle Cemetery into a public park. Commissioners were appointed to oversee the transition, which included managing the task of identifying lot owners and arranging for removal and reburial.
The Seattle Cemetery Removal and Reburial Register is included with SMA’s Don Sherwood Parks History Collection. It lists the names of those early Seattle residents buried in the cemetery between 1861 and 1884 and gives the locations to where they were moved. Also included with the register is an index of names, a map of the cemetery, and handwritten reports that were submitted by the Seattle Cemetery Commission to City Council.
This thin volume is full of valuable glimpses into many individual and family stories that speak to several larger stories. In addition to familiar early Seattle names like Denny, Terry, and McGilvra, the register notes a total of 29 Chinese immigrants who were reburied in the Wa Chong lot of the Masonic Cemetery. Noted as “Chinamen,” unfortunately we have no idea what their names were. This was soon after the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 and just a couple of years before violent expulsions of Chinese residents would break out in cities along the west coast, including Seattle. Other burials speak to sad tales of infant mortality, such as Keezer (child), O.S. Root’s Infant Child, D.T. Denny’s child, and Five Unknown Children.
The history of the register itself is also fascinating: according to a document enclosed with the volume, for decades it was believed to have been lost in the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. Luckily, however, in the rush to save records at city hall, the register was thrown into a vault attached to the office of Judge Cornelius Hanford, Chief Justice of the Washington Territory. Hanford rediscovered the record book in 1910 and gave it to Washington’s first attorney general, James Metcalfe. He gifted it to the Seattle Park Board, where it was forgotten for many years until its rediscovery in 1974.
Today the register is safely preserved at SMA and is now available online! Browse through the pages yourself and learn more at our Digital Collections site.