Grave Concerns Virtual Cache

Western State Hospital is located on the site of historic Fort Steilacoom. Fort Steilacoom served as a military post from 1849 to 1868 when the federal government abandoned it. The Washington territory purchased the fort with the intent of turning it into a hospital for the insane. The new hospital, called the "Insane Asylum of Washington Territory," opened in 1871 with 15 men and 6 women patients transferred in from Monticello, Washington.

The area now known as Fort Steilacoom Park was once the farm and orchard areas for the hospital. It was also the site of the cemetery for the hospital. The Western State Hospital Cemetery is a separate cemetery from the original military post cemetery, Fort Steilacoom Cemetery. (Fort Steilacoom Cemetery, which is on the hospital grounds and not open to the public.)

In 1871 an insane asylum opened at Ft Steilacoom, with the barracks serving as patient and staff housing. Hospital residents grew crops and orchards in the area that is now Fort Steilacoom Park and planted many of the Poplar trees that currently line the Waghop lake shore. 3,218 hospital residents are buried in the Fort Steilacoom or Western State Hospital Cemetery. As was with many hospital burials of the day, graves were either unmarked in marked rows or, like in this cemetery, only marked with a small concrete numbered block.

Faded numbers stamped into small cement blocks mark the graves of the more than 3,200 people buried between the 1870s and 1953. Through the years, Western State Memorial Cemetery was overgrown and over time, the stones themselves sank into the earth, leaving the dead in almost perfect obscurity. It was a bit hard to tell that this is indeed a cemetery because very few of the gravesites were accompanied by headstones. Without closer inspection, it looked just like a prairie field. There were only modest small, rectangular slabs—anonymously numbered markers where each person is buried. Looking across the field was a bit eerie because the ground has sunk in coffin-sized rectangular areas at most of the grave sites. Perhaps as the wood casket decomposed, the earth above caved in just enough to make a noticeable difference in ground level.

The cemetery was closed to burials in 1953 and those dying while at the Western State Hospital and not having anyone to claim their bodies, have been laid to rest in other local cemeteries.

A local volunteer group befriended the cemetery, and a program of restoration is underway with the goal here being to provide a marker with their name on each grave

A large monument at the cemetery’s entrance was put up in 2003 in honor of all of those buried there, but because the state’s confidentiality laws still prevailed, and the names of the interred could not be released. In 2004 the state law was changed and the first individual marker was placed later that year

Some of those buried here have historical significance, including John Moore, one of the first homesteaders in Des Moines who died in 1899, and Charles Victor ‘Victory’ Faust, who pitched two games for the then-New York Giants, and died at the hospital in 1915.

Civil War veterans who up until now has only been marked by the number, now lie here with their names and the well deserved recognition of being a veteran.

The cemetery is open to the public during park hours. Feel free to stroll about, read about the cemetery on the billboards, engage in a little more history of the area.

This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between August 24, 2017 and August 24, 2018. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards on the Geocaching Blog.

CONGRATULATION TO TEAM NOLTEX ON FIRST TO FIND.