Tombstones Under The Trees | Lone Fir Cemetery, Portland, Oregon
Season 2 Episode 39
The Grim is opening the gate and entering the oldest cemetery in the Pacific Northwest. Portland was built by people who survived impossible journeys, and Lone Fir Cemetery holds nearly all of them. Established in the 1850s on land where a pioneer father was buried as a condition of sale, Lone Fir became the final resting place for more than 25,000 souls: founders and frontier figures, poets and painters, asylum patients and immigrants, and over three thousand Chinese laborers whose graves were bulldozed in the 1950s to build a county parking lot. The oldest active cemetery in the Pacific Northwest is also Portland's second-largest arboretum, with more than seven hundred trees growing where memorial plantings once marked individual lives. But beneath the canopy, not everyone rests easy.
Featured Stories
The Origins of Lone Fir: From a frontier farm burial to Portland's central necropolis, the story of a city that outgrew its dead and consolidated them in a single place.
Block 14: The erasure of more than three thousand Chinese immigrant graves, the parking lot built over their remains, and the 2026 apology issued nearly a century after the desecration.
The Macleay Mausoleum: A $13,500 Gothic Revival monument in red sandstone, built by Scottish merchant Donald Macleay to honor his wife Martha, who died on New Year's Day 1876, the day after giving birth.
The Founders: Beneath the Trees Asa Lovejoy, who lost the coin toss that named Portland; Oregon's first Poet Laureate Samuel L. Simpson; painter Eliza Barchus; and Julius Caesar, the formerly enslaved man whose headstone reads "Play ball."
Emma Merlotin: A French courtesan brutally murdered on December 22, 1885, whose killer was never found, and whose shadow many believe still moves between the trees.
The Old Man in the Dark: A first-person account of an encounter at Lone Fir that left two visitors running and one unsettling question unanswered.
