Tacoma cemetery holds more than 1,600 people. Are their graves being covered up?
Only a handful of faded gravestones were visible amid the tall grass of an overgrown field abutting the Tacoma Cemetery in early April.
Although it’s not much to look at, the two-acre Tacoma Potter’s Cemetery — also called the Pierce County pauper cemetery — holds the bodies of more than 1,600 people laid to rest between the 1880s and 1920s. Many of their names have been lost to history but a few gravestones remain, although most of them have faded beyond recognition.
As previously reported by The News Tribune in 2016, Pierce County bought the land at South 52nd and South Junett Street from the adjacent Tacoma Cemetery in 1885 to bury people who could not afford to be buried elsewhere. The county sold the property back to the Tacoma Cemetery in 1973.
On April 4, a neighbor who often walks his dog in the Potter’s cemetery messaged The News Tribune, alleging Tacoma Cemetery was dumping dirt there, covering the graves of people.
Upon a visit Tuesday this reporter observed some dirt dumped at the top of the hill of the cemetery behind a wired fence, but no dirt covering any visible gravestones. Terry Schatz, who maintains both the Potter’s Cemetery and Tacoma Cemetery, told The News Tribune he moved some dirt and mulch there to fill in sunken spots in the field. Schatz said he’s careful to not disturb any graves and isn’t aware of any grave markers higher up on the hill.
“The majority of them are on the lower levels,” he said. “The last thing we want to do is desecrate it. I hope people don’t misunderstand that.”
Schatz said the Tacoma Cemetery is obligated to maintain the Potter’s Cemetery and noted he planned to trim the grass in the next couple of weeks. He said he’s filled in holes there a couple times over the last couple of months.
“I think for historical value, it certainly needs to be maintained,” Schatz said.
Among the people buried in the Potter’s Cemetery are Carl William Alex Gildenmeister, a Prussian sailor who drowned on the Tacoma waterfront in 1900. Others include two robbers killed in a gunfight, a logger who fell off a trail, people who died of tuberculosis, suicide or old age, laborers, immigrants, miners and infants.
Bill Habermann, a funeral director for the former Piper-Morley Funeral Home in Tacoma, spent time cataloging those buried there and entered their names and histories on a genealogy website.
Today unclaimed bodies in Pierce County are cremated and scattered. But at the time, many counties had pauper cemeteries. At the turn of the century, four Tacoma funeral homes would rotate every three months who was responsible for burying the poor, as previously reported by The News Tribune. The county paid them $4.50 per burial, which included the box, the delivery and the digging.
The county was responsible for the cemetery’s upkeep and epidemics sometimes prompted the cemetery to bury the dead “three or four deep,” Fried Steigler, a local historian, told The News Tribune. Workers were paid $10 to bury, by night, the unidentified bodies of disease victims, he said.
The cemetery’s appearance looks similar to the way it was described more than 120 years ago in an article published by The Spectator, a weekly Tacoma newspaper. A 1901 issue described the cemetery as “partially inclosed (sic) by dilapidated and weather-beaten fencing … tangled shrubbery and mounds of earth, bare and unshapely,” holding “several hundred persons who lay down the burden of life and left behind no record of their existence.”
This story was originally published April 12, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
