Monday, December 22, 2008

Bury Me Not on the Lone . . . Walmart?

Paved Paradise: Cemeteries in Parking Lots: "While I was researching the 'Cemetery Safari' chapter for my upcoming book Weird Oklahoma, I came across an unusual burial site west of Tulsa that was entirely enclosed within a strip-mall parking lot. Once sacred ground, it's now a conspicuous patch of grass in a sea of asphalt, a quirky spectacle to the shoppers forced to drive around it on their way to Radio Shack . . . And it got me thinking: were there others like it?"

Quite a few others, as it turns out--and check the comments section for even more. Does anyone know of such a landlocked cemetery in the Pacific Northwest?

[Pictured is the Tullahassee Creek Indian Cemetery – Sand Springs, Oklahoma: "Situated right between an ATM and a postal drop box, this Indian cemetery comprises about 1/4 acre of isolated turf in a parking lot outside Tulsa."]

Update: Alan Stein of HistoryLink.org points us to the Saar Cemetery in South King County, Washington, " surrounded on three sides by a Winco Foods parking lot and the fourth side is bounded by South 212th Street next to the Valley Freeway (State Hwy 167)." (Map) Thanks Alan!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Saar Cemetery in Kent comes close

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~waskcgs/saar/saar.html

Anonymous said...

I'm aware of several formerly isolated cemeteries that are now surrounded by new development around Puget Sound. Not as dramatic as the parking lot cemeteries listed here, but the phenomenon indicates the extent of suburban sprawl that has extended to these formerly out of the way sites. Here are a couple:

Ravensdale Cemetery
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=ravensdale,+wa&sll=47.093617,-122.995291&sspn=0.027522,0.054932&ie=UTF8&ll=47.357505,-121.986335&spn=0.001712,0.003433&t=h&z=18&iwloc=addr

Auburn Pioneer:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=auburn,+wa,+wa&sll=47.370455,-122.00592&sspn=0.21903,0.439453&ie=UTF8&ll=47.315179,-122.2236&spn=0.000813,0.001717&t=h&z=19

Great blog!

Larry Cebula said...

Thank you both!