Lone Fir Cemetery Foundation
Bringing History to Life
About the Lone Fir Cemetery Foundation
Portland’s Lone Fir Cemetery is a living storybook of Oregon’s history, recognizing the known and honoring the forgotten. Many of the Portland area’s historic cemeteries are owned and managed by Metro regional government, and the Lone Fir Cemetery Foundation assists Metro in the stewardship of Lone Fir Cemetery by promoting community engagement and providing financial support for care and improvements. The foundation strives to be a model of how our community should engage with and nurture our cemeteries as opportunities for education, culture, history, and active green spaces.
Origin
The Foundation was initially formed by a group of individuals who were determined that “Block 14” – the barren piece of land at the southwest corner of Lone Fir Cemetery – should become a garden memorializing the Chinese who were buried there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and whose gravesites were later treated with great disrespect. The Foundation’s founders and supporters represent many different groups, all of whom share that vision.
The Foundation’s founding members were Rebecca Liu and Marcus Lee of the Oregon Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association; Mary Faulkner of Ferguson Wellman Capital Management and former chair of Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery; Jane Hansen of Lango Hansen Landscape Architects; John Laursen, book designer and public-art typographer; and Stanley Clarke, cemetery historian and former member of the Oregon Commission on Historic Cemeteries and Rachel Essig, ex-officio member of Metro. The honorary co-chairs were former Oregon governors Barbara Roberts and the late Victor Atiyeh. Governor Roberts served on the Metro Council in 2011, where she championed the creation of the memorial garden at Lone Fir, and she continues as our honorary chair.