Steve States at St. Boniface cemetery
By Samantha Swindler
The Oregonian/OregonLive
Steve States was at the gym, flipping through a copy of the Statesman Journal, when a legal notice caught his eye. It announced a public hearing on the removal of the dedication for Mater Dolorosa Cemetery.
Removing a cemetery is odd enough, but this particular graveyard in Sublimity, a small town 15 miles southeast of Salem, interested him.
“I was a real estate appraiser for 25 years around here,” said States, now retired. “And many, many years ago I found the Mater Dolorosa on a map, and I knew it was smack dab in the middle of Marian Estates care home.”
States has no ties to Sublimity or Marian Estates, but he decided to research the cemetery and the fate of the bodies whose final resting place, it turns out, was only temporary.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It just seems to me that somebody needs to watch out after the people that have been buried and forgotten.”
But unearthing Mater Dolorosa’s secrets wasn’t going to be easy.
Sister Mary Clara, left, and Sister Mary Benitia
Marian Estates traces its roots to 1950, when a group of Servite nuns arrived from Austria to care for the elderly and infirm in this heavily Catholic community. They began their work in an old convent until a new building for the Marian Home was officially dedicated in 1955.
Under the nuns’ watch, a cemetery named Mater Dolorosa – Latin for “Mother of Sorrows” – was platted in 1964.
But in 1975, the nursing home was sold to a private owner who renamed it Marian Estates, expanded its offerings, and – for perfectly understandable reasons – did not want a cemetery at the center of his retirement community.
The bodies were removed and the 0.62-acre cemetery plat was developed with senior apartments, an access road and part of a parking lot.
Yet even without a physical presence, the Mater Dolorosa retained a digital footprint. A marker for the cemetery still shows up on Google Earth images of Marian Estates.
That's how it was discovered by Scott Ness, vice president of real estate development and asset management with Sante Partners, which is working with the owner of Marian Estates to clear the title to the property.
“I can’t tell you how many hours and days and weeks and months we have spent trying to dig up information on this,” he said. “Excuse the pun.”
The former cemetery, at center, is marked in faint yellow outline
The Oregon Burial Site Guide, generally considered a strong source for cemetery history, dates the Mater Dolorosa to "early 1900." But land records show it wasn't platted until 1964.
Ness also found paperwork showing that 11 bodies were disinterred from Mater Dolorosa in 1982 and reburied at the cemetery at St. Boniface Church. These included the bodies of three nuns: Sister Benitia, Sister Romana and Sister Agnes.
Ness thinks the Oregon Burial Site Guide is simply incorrect, and the cemetery wasn’t used until the plat in 1964.
But States isn’t so sure. He suspects the cemetery could be much older – and thus, potentially, have more burials.
For one thing, Sister Romana died in 1958, and Sister Benitia died in 1962. If the cemetery wasn’t created until 1964, how did they end up there?
He also noted that of the 11 graves supposedly moved to St. Boniface, there are only markers for seven. Where are the other four bodies?
The nuns graves at St. Boniface
States raised those questions during the public hearing in front of the county board earlier this month, and it got the attention of Commissioner Sam Brentano.
Brentano is a 40-year resident of Sublimity, a member of St. Boniface Parish, and the former owner of United Disposal Service.
If anyone knows where the bodies are buried, it’s the garbage man, right?
Sure enough, Brentano was on a route in 1982 and remembers seeing backhoes digging up graves at Marian Estates.
“And I’m wondering, how do they do that?” Brentano said during the hearing. “How do they just say, OK, this is no more and move them all out? It was a problem that troubled me at the time.”
After hearing States’ testimony, Brentano asked that the decision on the cemetery designation be delayed for a week until some of the questions could be cleared up.
The four graves at St. Boniface
The following Monday, States and I visited St. Boniface’s Cemetery of Holy Angels looking for the four missing bodies from Mater Dolorosa. The three nuns are there, buried behind the church’s priests. Along the back fence are another four headstones, with names matching those from the disinterment permits.
States moved aside the dirt to the left and right of those headstones where, according to the cemetery log book, four more graves should be.
We found nothing.
Ness, meanwhile, had tracked down Herman Hendricks, now in his 90s and still living in Sublimity, who was the gravedigger for St. Boniface cemetery. He remembered burying the two sisters in St. Boniface, then moving them to Mater Dolorosa when it opened, then moving them back to St. Boniface in 1982.
So that solved one mystery — the nuns were moved twice.
Next, Ness went in search of the graves, and he remembered hearing that some graves were marked only by 5- by 7-inch metal plates.
“I woke up at 4 in the morning,” he said, “and had an epiphany.”
Where States searched for the headstones
He borrowed his father’s metal detector and headed over to St. Bonifice. He saw where States had already moved the dirt and searched with the metal detector nearby. He hit on something below the grass, just feet from where we had looked two days before.
He unearthed four metal plaques, in varying states of decay. Behind a glass frame, each held a typed piece of paper with the names and ages of the deceased. They matched the disinterment records.
All 11 graves were accounted for.
A few hours later, the Marion County Board of Commissioners approved the removal of the designation for the Mater Dolorosa Cemetery.
An unearthed grave marker
“I’m afraid I wasted your time,” States said when it was all over.
Not so, I said.
Possibly due to the poor condition of the paper markers, the cemetery log book lists the other two discovered graves as unknowns.
Thanks to the disinterment records, we know they are Max Lohse and Nan Lane. If States hadn’t gotten curious, and if Ness hasn’t kept looking, they would have remained forever anonymous.
The state didn’t start regulating cemeteries until 1986, so there would have been no requirement that family members be notified when the bodies were moved from Mater Dolorosa. No one would have found them.
Nan Lane's grave marker
In the microfilm archives of the Stayton Mail newspaper, States and I discovered Max Lohse’s obituary notice from 1971, which noted he died at a local nursing home and had no known survivors.
Nan Lane’s obituary, in the Statesman Journal, offered more detail. She died in 1972 “in a Sublimity nursing home where she had lived for seven years. She was born in London, England, and had lived in Portland for 62 years, where she was a cashier and switchboard operator. Surviving are a daughter, Mrs. Barbara Rice, Portland, and five grandchildren.”
I found an obituary for a Barbara Rice of Portland, who had five children and received a Catholic burial in 2003. She would have been born when Nan Lane was about 22.
But after this, the trail for any living survivors goes cold. Perhaps someone will recognize these names and will learn their grandmother or great-grandmother was moved from her final resting place and lies in an unmarked grave at the back of a Sublimity cemetery.
At the very least, their names can be added to the cemetery rolls and States can say he met his goal: That those who were buried are not forgotten.
-- Samantha Swindler is a columnist for The Oregonian/Oregonlive
@editorswindler / 503-294-4031
sswindler@oregonian.com
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