As per usual, I thought I had landed on a topic for a post that would be quick and easy to write, but then I scratched the surface and found a lot more fascinating information. Because of the title of this post, I’m sorely tempted to save this for Halloween. But who am I kidding? It’s way too interesting for me to keep it to myself for that long.
Let me start off by telling you about Saar Pioneer Cemetery. I pass by it nearly every day, and it has intrigued me for a while now. It’s surrounded on three sides by the WinCo Grocery Store parking lot, and there’s a 4-lane road in front of it. The cars blast by without giving this little plot of ground much notice. I’ve never seen anyone visit it, and technically you can’t anyway, because there has been too much vandalism, so it’s now locked. It wasn’t always like this, of course.
The White River Valley, where it’s located, had long been occupied by various Native American tribes, including the Duwamish and the Muckleshoot. It was a fertile valley, and these tribes lived harmoniously therein, until, of course, the first white settlers showed up in 1853. Even though Washington was still a territory (it did not become a state until 1889), The Donation Land Claims Act gave each single white male 320 acres of land when occupied and improved for five years. A married couple could claim 640 acres.
Needless to say, the Native Americans weren’t thrilled with this development, and there was a “period of upset” called the Puget Sound War from 1855-1856. The US Military had superior fire power, of course, so by 1857 most of the land’s original inhabitants were shunted off to the Muckleshoot Reservation nearby. That meant the settlers could sweep in and take the land without fear of reprisal. Naturally, they did so. (It is always rather startling to remember that America was founded by a sea of white people who were devoid of a moral compass, but there you have it.)
The Saar Family came to the valley around 1865. Their land was located on the East Hill of Kent, Washington, a community just south of Seattle. Peter Saar was quite successful in that he was a farmer, a lumber mill owner, and a landlord. He also served as a King County Commissioner.
He lived for 81 years, which was rather impressive during that era. His wife, Margaret Saar, was not so lucky. She was 31 in 1873 when she died due to complications while giving birth to their eighth child.
Since there was no established graveyard in the area at that time, the Saar Pioneer Cemetery started rather organically. Margaret was buried on a grassy knoll on the Saar property. Eventually other community members joined her, and the cemetery grew to 1.5 acres.
By 1905, Peter Saar had moved away, and he deeded the cemetery to the Kent United Methodist Church, which he had helped to found. The cemetery remained active until 1949, when the last known burial took place. By then approximately 200 people had been buried on the site, including four Civil War veterans and one veteran of WWI.
One disturbing tidbit about the cemetery that I stumbled upon while doing research for this post was the fact that in 1923, the site was used for a meeting of the state Ku Klux Klan. There were nearly 1,000 people gathered, and “King Keagle”, a Klan leader, spoke. There were also fireworks and several tall burning crosses. Fortunately, this was the first and last such event to occur at the cemetery.
After that last burial in 1949, the cemetery was mostly abandoned, and became choked with blackberry bushes, ivy, and grass that grew to about a foot tall. You could only see a handful of headstones. Many had been knocked over, or had weathered so much that the inscriptions could not be read. It was a dark, gloomy place, and local youth had spray painted many of the trees and left beer bottles everywhere.
Fortunately, the South King County Genealogical Society began a restoration effort in 2004. It took 10 years to complete. You can read about the project in detail here. Now, as this brief Youtube video indicates, the cemetery looks beautiful again, despite being surrounded by urban sprawl. (It still has to remain locked. People suck.)
Presently, the cemetery is 1 acre in size, rather than 1.5, so now when I drive past it, I can’t help but wonder how many bodies are buried beneath the grocery store parking lot. In fairness, the land was leveled before paving began, so one would think any corpses would have made themselves evident. Hard to say. During the restoration and its accompanying research, they discovered that there were at least 89 unmarked graves. Some might never have had markers, others may have only had wooden crosses which did not age well, and still more were the victims of time and vandalism.
During my research, I came across a lot of fascinating history about the people who rest in this cemetery. You can find quite a bit of it on the Genealogical Society’s website. Unfortunately, there seems to be very little known about a few of the more unusual denizens of the cemetery: the Baby Monsters. There are three of them.
The first Baby Monster shares a headstone with John C. Monster, the child’s father. The baby lasted less than 4 months, and died in 1889. John was born in 1851 and died in 1890. No one seems to know why the child has no first name on the headstone. Maybe the monument was made years after the deaths, and by then no one remembered what the child’s name was. Or maybe no one had the heart to give the child a name because it was pretty clear that he or she wasn’t going to make it.
Needless to say, Baby Monster’s headstone has a certain level of notoriety on the internet. All quirky things do. A quick and lazy Google search yielded posts here, here, and here, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In 1889 when this child died, life expectancy in America was about 47 years, and 300 out of 1000 children did not make it to age 5. At the time, it was not unusual for people to share the same drinking cups, so tuberculosis abounded. So did smallpox, typhoid fever, yellow fever, scarlet fever, and bubonic plague. Hogs with cholera were being sold for human consumption. Indoor plumbing only showed up in 1891, and it was only found in wealthy households. In King County, the Department of Sanitation, with its ability to appoint a health officer, wasn’t established until 1891. And in 1889, in particular, there was an influenza pandemic that wiped out at least a million people worldwide.
Baby Monster chose a very disease-laden time to come into the world. (At least he or she was saved from all the teasing that would have been inevitable in junior high school with a name like that.) The child’s mother was named Anna Marie Nielsen Monster. She was born in 1861 and died at the age of 59 in 1920. She is buried in the same cemetery in an unmarked grave.
Below her on the list of unmarked graves are two other Monsters. The first one, a female, was born in January of 1912, and her date of death is unknown, but since once again we have no first name, it’s very likely that she was still an infant. The second Monster, a male, was born almost 9 months to the day after the female was born, and he only lived two days.
Were these two Monsters the siblings, cousins, or nieces and nephews to Baby Monster? We can’t be sure. Anna would have been 28 when Baby Monster died, 29 when her husband died, and 51 when the other two Monsters died. It is very rare for a woman of 51 to have two babies, and it would have been even more rare back then, so it’s possible that Anna was their grandmother.
Anna did have a daughter that died in 1903, so that ruled her out as the mother of these babies. Besides, her last name at the time was Mallory. Anna had another daughter who would have been 26 when these children were born, but she had taken on the last name Stiles when she got married, so the babies, too, would most likely be Stiles.
I can say that these two mystery Monsters were born in precarious times as well. In 1912, the life expectancy had only increased slightly. You could expect to live to be 52. And 206 out of 1000 children died before age 5. (By contrast, now our life expectancy is about 76 years, and only 7 per 1000 children die before age 5.) Typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and bubonic plague were still present in 1912 America, and nearby Seattle had only just begun collecting garbage that year, so you can imagine what conditions were like in the countryside. What these two babies died of is unknown.
I was feeling a bit lost as to where these Monster babies fit in the family tree. But then I went over to ancestry.com, and there I discovered that John and Anna had had yet another child, a son, Charles, who was born in 1884 and died in 1962. He’d have been 28 at the time of the birth and death of these babies, and they would, indeed, have been Monsters.
To add more evidence to the mix, Charles did go on to have a son in 1913, whom he named John Charles Monster, after the boy’s grandfather. (If this child was a sibling to the mystery Monsters, then all I can say is, that poor mother! First, two dead babies, 9 months apart, and then this boy, who would have come along, at the very most, 14 months later!) The good news is that boy lived to be 90 years old. He passed away in 2003. (Charles’ ancestry page says he only had one child rather than three, but it would not have been unusual not to “count” the children that didn’t survive.)
Did that surviving child, John Charles, have any children? I would have had to pay to find out. I’m not curious enough to pay. (Just dipping my toe into Ancestry.com is always dangerous, because I do get sucked in. I love a good family tree.)
From what I can see, Monsters abound in this world. Our original Monster, John C., came from Denmark. But I found Monsters in Belgium, Canada and the Netherlands as well. Apparently Ancestry.com has 17,000 records for Monster.
Based on those records, Ancestry.com believes that 67 percent of all male Monsters, historically, have been farmers, and the rest were laborers. This makes sense, because Monster Road in Renton, the next town over from Kent, is named after Charles. According to this article, someone in the Renton City Hall says he had a farm along the road years ago.
That city employee said that Monster Road inspired a company to name their business Spider Staging on Monster Road. (If it’s the same Spider Staging that I found online, it started in 1950, has spread to the largest cities across the nation, and has a branch in nearby Tukwila, yet another bedroom community to Seattle, so they did quite well for themselves.)
Now, every time I drive past the Saar Pioneer Cemetery, I think of the Monsters therein. I wish I knew more about them. From the details I do have, I can surmise that this family was well acquainted with grief and hard work. They were pioneers who, like their contemporaries, had many, many children in order to feel secure that at least one would carry on their name. They were people who never gave up.
According to whitepages.com, there are still Monsters walking amongst us, but I wouldn’t want to intrude upon them simply because I have a freakish obsession with their surname. I hope they are aware of their ancestry and that they appreciate how much hard work and heartache and determination it took for them to exist. May they live long and prosper and maintain their legacy.
As for Monster Road, apparently it still has a mystery. It’s only fitting, with a name like that. I’d blog about it, but information is scant.
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