: Worries at Rest - 2007

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Worries at Rest

Ralph Dreher, 89, surveys the refurbished Livingston Cemetery that Clark County jail work crews have cleaned up.
His mother and grandparents are buried there, and he hopes soon to bury his late son, Michael Dreher, on the site.
(photo by BEN CAMPBELL/The Columbian)











Monday, October 01, 2007
BY DEAN BAKER, Columbian staff writer

PROEBSTEL - Thanks to Clark County jail work crews, it looks like 89-year-old Ralph Dreher and his wife, Harriet, will lay their late son Michael to rest in the Livingston Cemetery, which had gone to seed after Dreher grew too old to tend it.

The 113-year-old graveyard is where Dreher's mother, Dolly, was buried after she died of heart failure at 36 in 1932. The 2-acre graveyard is on the edge of Camp Bonneville near Dreher's boyhood home. In the 1920s, he caught trout in Lacamas Creek nearby and often dropped in to visit moonshiners and the old tobacco drying shed that stood in the trees.

His grandparents, George and Mary Munsell Dreher, and his uncle, Augustus I. Dreher, also are buried there, along with several of his cousins. They rest near an unknown Union soldier from the Civil War, whose gravestone is marked "Yankee Doodle," and the first postmaster of Proebstel, Andrew Helms, who died in 1912.

Because of all that family history, Dreher said he and Harriet, 83, would like to bury the ashes of their son, Michael, between the grandparents' graves and Dreher's mother. Michael, of Long Beach, died of a heart attack just before Easter at age 59.

No one has been buried in the cemetery since 1934. Yet, until the 1990s, the family and neighbors kept the burial plot looking good.

Dreher remembers �tending the graves on Decoration Day as early as 1923, and taking his two sons, �Michael and Philip, to cut grass and trim the graves in the 1960s. But, in recent years, as the old-timers died, the cemetery grass grew ragged, the graves sank and the stones tilted. Some folks even threatened to cut the trees around the cemetery.

Dreher loudly objected, but he's crippled with heart problems, the aches and pains of aging and a broken arm. He hasn't been able to tidy up the graveyard himself or find allies to do it.

Dreher wanted to see the cemetery preserved. It was just a question of who was going to take care of it.

The buck was passed a bit before the county officials took up the cause.

The land was deeded to the county by Dreher's relative, Henry Munsell, in 1894. The county listed the plot as one of several tax-exempt public cemeteries in the county that have no clear rules of upkeep. The plot lay within Clark County Cemetery District 1, based in Camas. But the district declined to take it over because the action would have required a public vote, and the election would cost $1,200.


Last modified on Monday, October 01, 2007