Honoring Chinese immigrants buried in Portland’s Lone Fir Cemetery

Lone Fir Cemetery is one of the oldest continuously operating cemeteries in Portland. It also serves as a painful reminder of the racist and exclusionary treatment of Chinese immigrants who first arrived in Oregon in the mid-1800s, working as miners, merchants and other laborers. From the 1860s to the 1920s, roughly 2800 Chinese immigrants were buried in a section of Lone Fir known as Block 14. Ledgers were used to record the names of many of the people who were buried there so that the remains could be dug up and the bones sent to China for reburial in ancestral villages and towns. By the late 1940s, Multnomah County officials claimed that all remains at Block 14 had been repatriated. But they hadn’t, according to an archaeological survey commissioned by the county in 2005 which found evidence of human remains at the site. 

Today, Block 14 is a bare field with no permanent reminder of its history or significance to the Chinese American community. But Metro, the regional government agency which owns the cemetery, is attempting to change that by using a voter-approved parks bond to build a memorial to honor the memory of people buried at Block 14. The project will also honor former patients from the state’s first psychiatric hospital, the Oregon Hospital for the Insane, nearly 200 of whom were buried at Lone Fir. Hannah Erickson, a communications specialist at Metro Parks and Nature, and Helen Ying, president of the Lone Fir Cemetery Foundation, join us to discuss the history of Block 14 and the two design proposals for the memorial.