The tall, prominent grave marker of Dr. James Hawthorne, who co-founded Oregon’s first mental hospital, is a well-known landmark in Lone Fir Cemetery. Now, thanks to recent research, the graves of some of Hawthorne’s patients have new markers of their own.
In 2021, Metro hired historians to research the history of the far southwest corner of the cemetery, called “Block 14” on cemetery maps, as part of its due diligence before building a memorial at the site. At the time, it was widely believed that Block 14 had been the location of burials for both people of Chinese ancestry and patients of the Oregon Hospital for the Insane.
However, the researchers discovered that it was highly unlikely that patients had been buried at Block 14. Rather, records showed that many patients had been buried at Block 10, about 150 feet north of Block 14. This block was called “the asylum grounds” in old cemetery records.
The Oregon Hospital for the Insane, also called the Hawthorne Asylum, operated in Portland from 1861 to 1883. During that time, hundreds of people were institutionalized there with diagnoses that included not just mental illnesses but also other conditions that were lumped together by 19th-century medicine, including developmental disabilities, epilepsy, age-related dementia and addiction. The hospital had a contract with Lone Fir Cemetery to bury patients whose bodies were unclaimed. It is believed that Hawthorne paid for many of the burials himself.
The research commissioned by Metro determined that the remains of 185 patients are buried at Lone Fir. Due to spotty record-keeping in the 19th century, only 61 grave sites could be located; of those, 54 were in Block 10. However, most of those graves lacked markers.
“It’s possible they had wooden markers originally, which would have been destroyed by decay or fire over the years,” said Metro cemeteries program coordinator Emma Williams, who has overseen other projects at the cemetery to install headstones at unmarked graves of firefighters and veterans. “Looking at the records we’ve found, I wouldn’t be surprised if they never had markers at all. That’s why I was so excited about this headstone project: It’s like saying, ‘There, now you aren’t forgotten!’”
Williams used the new research to install stone markers for known unmarked patient graves. In all, 48 grave markers were installed.
The markers are flat and simple, bearing just the deceased’s name (when known) and year of burial. Metro is now working to create a new welcome sign for the cemetery that includes Block 10’s hidden history.
Learn more about the history of patient burials at Lone Fir and about the memorial project at Block 14