Sara Union Cemetery, Ridgefield Washington.
These are the graves of my great aunt Helena and her husband Phillip.



Clara was Phillips mother.

Less than a mile away, up on top of a beautiful hill on the way to Felida, Helena lived in a bright pink 2 story house that Phillip had build on his family's land. His mother and father lived next door in an old white farm house.

Back in their day, everyone in Ridgefield and Felida (neighbouring towns) was pretty much a farmer of some sort. My great grandfather had a huge field of strawberries, and a cherry orchard. Along with the fruit they grew for sale, they also had three fields with vegetables growing, and a grape vine that circled the property. His brothers were all farmers as well, and his sisters all pretty much married farmers.
Phillip's family raised cattle for dairy and beef. They also had goats and a few sheep, but mostly it was the cows.

When they came of age, like most young men of age during WWI, Phillip and his brothers joined the Army. He served a small tour and then returned home to the farm. Being a worldly man now, he would travel to the city and that was where he met the beautiful and talented Helena, Who was just beginning her career as a Ballerina. Of course, she was looking to remain in the city, but love conquers everything, and she married Phillip and remained a country girl.

A long story short, Phillip's mother Clara came down with tuberculosis about a year before she died. They sent her to a sanitorium, which apparently was where you sent people with tuberculosis. Because of this, Phillip and Helena took charge of the farm.


Unfortunately, in late 1930, Helena took ill. Her symptoms so similar to Tuberculosis, and with the diagnostic tests being not so exact, she was sent to a sanitorium. The same one as her husbands mother. There she caught tuberculosis and died in 1931. Same year as Clara.

About a year after her death, it was revealed to Phillip the truth about Helena's death. The doctor that diagnosed her wasn't sure, but figured better safe than sorry, about sending her to the sanitorium. The results to the test that he did actually showed that she had become sick from bad milk. That made much more sense anyways, because the rest of the family had developed a slight rash and intestinal issues, same as Helena, at the same time, only hers were much more severe.

Phillip never remarried, and died in the house that he build for his beautiful ballerina. Many of her possessions made their way back to her family (The Bryants) and my older sister and one of my mom's sisters both have some of her costume jewelry and many of her photographs from when she was a ballerina.

George, Jim and Mary.
No one knows when George died (or when he was born, for that matter) But  Jim died in 1912, and Mary in 1936. The three are buried between two giant cedar trees, and until the late 1990's, the trees had completely covered the grave stone. When you approach it now, you'll notice the stone is artificially aged, since the original grave marker was damaged during the removal of the bottom half of the tree branches and the accumulation of years of overgrowth. For a few years, the broken gravestone remained, but it had been replaced since the last time I visited.


Many of the gravestones are shaped like tubes. Bryant brown is one of the many with this style of gravestone, apparently signifying that they served in the civil war.

There are quite a lot of servicemen in this cemetery. The flag in the distance is on the grave of one particular high ranking military man.



Another sad thing about this cemetery, is that about half of the graves are those of children that died at birth or under the age of 3. Of those graves, most were buried here alone, meaning that no one else in their family is buried there.


Buried alone, none of their family is buried at this cemetery.

Over the years, many of the grave markers have been damaged at Sara Union Cemetery. Most of the damage is due to nature taking its course, flooding and general neglect. A few sites have been vandalized, but generally people do not visit this cemetery.

Well meaning mourners leaving flowers that managed to sprout full blooming bushes that have in some cases caused gravestones to lift and buckle from deep roots and continued growth, funeral wreath holders, rusted and slumped over man of the graves remain undisturbed because no family remains in the area, and the church that maintains the cemetery generally leaves well enough alone.

A few of the oldest residents of this cemetery had their graves marked with wooden markers. Now there are quite a few people buried there that no one knows the location of, and even more that no one knows anything but a first or last name, or even just the year of their death.

This cemetery is about 10 feet from a main road, nestled a bit too closely to a power hub and a seeding farm. Still, its very peaceful, and not a bit spooky. Still, I always feel like crying when I see "baby" or "died at birth" written on a grave stone.

-A.