Cemetery needs community support | Letter to the editor

Posted

I visited the local Discovery Bay Cemetery recently to see if our local veterans graves had been decorated in lieu of Memorial Day honors, etc. 

Not a single veteran’s resting place had been denoted with a flag as usually done. 

The condition of our local pioneers and ancient peoples burial grounds are deplorable! Headstones and markers are missing. Scotch bloom is seeding itself and growing unopposed. It is unmowed and ungroomed and seems to be abandoned?

Now I have been a resident and landowner here at the head of Discovery Bay in one capacity or another since 1944. Went from first grade to graduating from high school there 1957; lived there since 1962 in one state or another. I am now retired ole fuddy-duddy/geezer looking forward to being buried at the cemetery. How come there is not anyone near my Fire District No. 5 taking care of the cemetery?

We should have a cemetery district such as Gardiner and Quilcene. All citizens within our Fire District No. 5 or Voter District 108 all should be paying maintenance fees from our tax base to help support and beautify and maintain our resting place for our Native American brothers and pioneers who settled and brought forth and developed the countryside here. We should honor those military veterans who are interred there from
World War I through Vietnam. It’s time for those younger folks who live here to go and take charge and honor their fathers/mothers and relatives graves. They know who they are and now it’s time for them to step up to the plate and help this wonderful community out. 

For all those years through the 1940s/1950s and into the 1960s, many of us old-timers took care of the grounds and veterans’ graves, monthly. So what has happened? New markers need to be reinstalled. I have information on missing grave stones. Anyone interested should call me for location.

Raymond E. Hunter
PORT TOWNSEND