Honoring forgotten veterans: Fort Vancouver’s DAR chapter works to document, memorialize veterans who vanished

BRUSH PRAIRIE — A new, gleaming, granite military headstone marks the spot where the remains of one forgotten American veteran had nearly vanished into the underbrush — and perhaps into total obscurity forever.

Janet Critchfield is not related to U.S. Army Pvt. Harold J. Marsh, who died in 1938, but after a solemn July ceremony with honor guard, she proudly accepted a folded-up flag in Marsh’s honor. The flag is headed for eventual display under glass at Critchfield’s home, alongside a collection of her late father’s medals and uniform.

“They’re both named Harold,” said Critchfield, whose father was U.S. Army Sgt. Harold E. Fimple, a decorated World War II combat veteran. Now, she said, her family circle feels a little larger thanks to the recent inclusion of humble Harold Marsh, a World War I veteran she never knew but worked hard to honor properly nonetheless.

Critchfield and friends with the Fort Vancouver chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution have adopted Brush Prairie Cemetery’s military legacy. In addition to trimming vegetation and scrubbing existing headstones, the Daughters of the American Revolution Cemetery Committee researches and documents the identities of veterans buried here without proper headstones.

Some got metal funeral home markers intended to be temporary. Many of those metal markers were never replaced with headstones. Decades later, some have just about disappeared underground.

The committee is working to rescue and replace those markers, providing headstones for veterans who should have gotten them.

“We have placed 13 headstones at Brush Prairie and we figure it’s been about 2,000 hours of work,” cemetery volunteer Peri Muhich said. “Our little committee has a budget of about $60 per year.”

Most of that gets spent on photocopying and postage. At a volunteer work party in October, committee members and their grandkids used supplies donated by American Legion Post 176: 8 gallons of D/2 Biological Solution, 24 brushes and 12 spray bottles.

Fortunately, the group doesn’t have to spend any money on headstones because the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs supplies them for free when a deceased veteran’s status has been proven. Plenty of veterans organizations — from AmVets to the Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association — are eager to help with memorial ceremonies to accompany a new stone, Muhich said. That has happened at Brush Prairie several times over the past few years. (The group was to be back at Brush Prairie Cemetery on Veterans Day to place memorial flags on headstones, Muhich said.)

Because official death and burial records from the early 1900s are inconsistent at best, the group’s self-motivated researchers routinely dig through ancillary historical materials — including funeral home documents, newspaper obituaries and whatever other clues they can find — to document soldiers’ lives, military service, deaths and burials.

Meanwhile, the group is pursuing a parallel project that’s going slower and proving more complicated: providing publicity, signage and eventually public access for a small and isolated but significant historical cemetery on a Hazel Dell hilltop, the former Clark County Poor Farm cemetery.

Among approximately 200 people buried there are at least seven military veterans, Muhich said, and likely more.

While the Poor Farm cemetery is on public land, it’s still an island without access. It’s surrounded on one side by private homes and on others by unused but fenced-off acreage that’s adjacent to both the Clark County’s Heritage Farm property (to the north) and Hazel Dell Community Park (to the east). The closest you can get to the cemetery now is the fenced west side of the park, where you can peer across the hillside at a wooden fence and information panel, which certainly can’t be read from such a distance.

Critchfield and her Daughters of the American Revolution colleagues are eager to see the virtually unknown cemetery get the respect and resources it deserves. That means accurate signage, including the names of the veterans buried there. But, they’ve been told, making anything permanent happen there may take at least until 2028.

“I wish it didn’t take so long,” Muhich said.

A temporary sign could go in as soon as next spring, said Ross Hoover, Clark County Parks and Nature division manager. But eventually, the historic cemetery will be integrated into a larger upgrade and access plan aimed at connecting Heritage Farm and Hazel Dell Community Park. The plan likely will include permanent park pathways, boardwalks and cemetery viewpoints. Those improvements are still years away.

“We think the DAR project is great, and we will work with them, but we want to go even further,” Hoover said. “We want to tell the whole story of the cemetery, including the names of the veterans and everyone else who is buried there.”

‘Inmates’ and veterans

What’s now called the Clark County Heritage Farm used to be a poor farm — a place where indigent and elderly people lived and, if able, worked raising crops and livestock. Clark County’s poor farm operated from 1873 until 1943, when 28 acres of the site were leased to what was then named Washington State College for an experimental farm. Now, the county owns the farm and operates the site in partnership with WSU Clark County Extension, which runs several programs there, including leasing community garden plots and growing food for the Clark County Food Bank. The site was included on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.

What was life at a county poor farm like? For one thing, residents were generally called “inmates,” which conveys just how much respect society afforded them. According to the 2012 National Register nomination, different local newspaper reports in the 1920s and 1930s found conditions at Clark County’s poor farm either reasonably sanitary and humane, or frankly miserable. Across America, county-based poor farms didn’t start disappearing until a federal system of old age and disability insurance — what we call Social Security — began in 1935.

“The farm isolated the impoverished and ill from the community while exercising social control over them,” historian Martin Middlewood recently wrote in this newspaper. “The quality of residents’ care, cleanliness and nutrition varied widely depending on the supervisor.”

The poor farm’s historic cemetery, up near the ridgeline that divides the Heritage Farm from Hazel Dell Community Park, contains about 200 graves, according to a 2010 ground-penetrating radar study conducted by SWCA Environmental Consultants. A wooden fence was added to delineate the cemetery boundary in 2018.

But not everybody buried in Clark County’s Poor Farm cemetery was a poor farm “inmate,” Muhich said.

“Many of the burials are not actually associated with the poor farm,” the 2012 Historic Register nomination states. “Often, transients, or those with no family or no known family were also buried at the county cemetery.”

Official records of who lived and who died at the poor farm, and who was buried in its cemetery, are inconsistent at best, Muhich said. But other community records sometimes fill in the blanks.

“Sometimes deaths would get recorded, but a lot of times they didn’t,” she said. “But there would usually be an obituary in the newspaper, and there might be funeral home records too.”

For example, a newspaper obituary is how Muhich knows that David Hurt, a Civil War veteran from Kansas, died at the poor farm at age 74 on Feb. 9, 1900. Hurt’s wife died before him and his children appear to have abandoned him, Muhich said.

And yet, there’s no specific record of Hurt’s burial at the poor farm cemetery, Muhich said. While it’s hard to imagine him winding up anywhere else, Muhich is still running down clues to eliminate that possibility, she said.

It’s more than likely, Muhich added, that some bodies were interred here by local families without any record at all. It’s likely that more graves could be discovered here, both within and possibly outside the 2018 fenceline. That could complicate the matter of where an eventual walking path goes.

Cemetery committee member Ruth Morgan said it hurts her heart to think of local soldiers serving their country, falling into poverty, winding up at the poor farm and then disappearing into unmarked graves. When the Poor Farm cemetery project does move forward, she said, the historically appropriate term “poor farm” must be retained.

Tragically, she said, veterans of today still wind up homeless too often.

“Was it true then too?” she wondered. “Was landing at the poor farm a consequence of serving your country?”