Listen E. Baldwin, despite having a given name that was both unique and good advice, was instead known by his middle name from his earliest days: Earl. He was a typical New York farm boy, born in the village of Jackson in 1878, the first child in a large family that relocated to nearby White Creek while the boys were still small. As they grew up, Earl and his three much younger brothers—Arty, Charlie, and George—became their father Hiram’s crew, working tirelessly to care for the animals and the crops as soon as they were old enough to hold a hoe. Their mother Lucinda gave birth to her first little girls only after fulfilling her husband’s requirement for enough sons to run the farm—or so it seemed to the boys. A new world of petticoats and pin curls, hair ribbons and high button shoes arrived with the two tiny girls, mystifying but amusing the contingent of older brothers who made it their business to protect their little sisters from the difficult realities of farming in upstate New York.

Earl assumed his own life would follow the same blueprint as his parents’ when he married a local girl with a unique name of her own. Danna was only 18 when they wed; Earl was 25. He had waited, wisely, until his father was ready to carve acreage off of the family farm so that he could start his own farm and his own family at the same time—a new life coincidentally set to begin in the earliest days of a brand new century. He was thrilled when on one fine May morning Danna confided in him that their first child was one its way. Earl whooped in the dooryard, spinning Danna in a circle that scattered the chickens and sent their collie dog barking in delighted confusion. By Earl’s calculations, his son would be old enough to start learning to help with the farm work just as his younger brothers would leave their dad’s place to start families of their own. It was so easy for Earl to visualize what was to come; he had only to remember his own childhood to see the past repeating itself happily into the future.

That fall (1904), Earl had an earnest conversation with his three teenaged brothers about their usual Halloween hijinks. He pleaded with them to show some compassion to Danna if not to him. She was due to give birth at any time and could not possibly be expected to cope with pranks like overturned outhouses or soaped up windows. As Earl spoke, Charlie dragged the toe of his boot through the scattered straw on the barn floor in a guilty way. Arty promised they would behave while staring fixedly at the ground. And George gave Earl his personal assurance that he’d beat anyone who violated Danna’s peace into a bloody pulp. The new baby, who still existed only in theory as far has his brothers were concerned, was already changing Earl in unanticipated ways.

Two days after that uneventful Halloween, Danna finally gave birth to a little girl just as the sun peeked over the horizon on a grey Wednesday morning. Of course Earl knew that such an arcane eventuality as a girl child was possible, but it really hadn’t occurred to him to plan beyond his own experience of sons arriving first. But he wasn’t concerned. There’d be more babies, and still plenty of time for the sons he knew he would eventually need to keep the farm going. Danna suggested that they name the delicate, grey-eyed infant Theresa, and Earl readily agreed as he stared into the baby’s drowsy, pink face for the very first time. No, Theresa wasn’t a son, but she was beautiful, and she was his, and he was smitten.

But the future continued to unfold in an unrelenting departure from Earl’s plans. His wife Danna, despite all odds, did not become pregnant again. And little Theresa turned out to be a delicate child, frequently ill and capturing Danna’s time and attention more fully than Earl had even dreamed possible. As his brothers drifted away to lives of their own, oldest son Earl was left to shoulder the burden of not only his own farm, but his aging father’s as well. It wasn’t in Earl’s nature to ask for help, but he found himself frequently still at his chores as the moon rose, repairing fences  or hauling water to the milk cows with only his collie dog for silent company. When he thought of the future, he could only see his work mounting without cease. A niggling worm of desperation had taken hold of his heart. He couldn’t help but make a repeated wish that something would break the log jam of work and worry; something eventually had to give.

And change did come, but not in a form Earl would ever have wished for or anticipated. It happened just after Halloween when Theresa was six years old. She was sick again, probably exposed to some bug or another by one of her schoolmates. There always seemed to be some sickness passed from child to sniffling child at the school, and Theresa could never dodge any of it. Danna even kept her at home in her bed over Halloween, although she was too sick to protest the decision.  Her parents hoped she would recover in time for the small birthday party they’d planned for her on November 2, but despite the doctor’s best efforts, Theresa did not rally. Instead, she declined steadily, her breathing worsening until it became an alarming wheeze that kept even the dog agitated while anchored firmly to her beside. Finally, on November 2—her seventh birthday—Theresa passed away at home, her desperate parents pacing at her bedside. Earl didn’t think Danna would ever stop crying. And he didn’t think he’d ever be able to look at himself in the mirror, knowing the secret wish he’d made but never even voiced out loud. He scraped together enough money for a marble tombstone for Theresa’s grave topped with a small lamb, still feeling like her death was probably in some way his fault.

Theresa died in 1911, well before the discovery of antibiotics or the arrival of childhood vaccinations. In those days, the death of a child was a tragically common occurrence, and parents were expected to soldier on. That’s what Earl and Danna did, attending Christmas services and 4^th-of-July picnics, and tending their house and farm. They even continued to try to have more children through increasingly joyless couplings that never again resulted in conception. By 1920 Earl had largely given up on his childhood dreams of a family farm. He took a job as a laborer with the railroad, leaving Danna at home to care for the chickens and the lethargic hound that replaced their collie dog not long after Theresa’s death. The Great War had finally ended, but prohibition had arrived with a joyless finality. The days of frivolous, lighthearted happiness seemed to have passed by before they had even fully arrived for the Baldwins. Certainly this was true for Danna; she was a mother without a child, and (in those days) a woman without a role. She died in 1926 at age 41, an age at which she had probably lost all hope of ever being a mother again.

And Earl? He didn’t stay with the railroad for long. By 1930 his was back on a Washington County farm with a new wife. Hannah was a couple of years older than he and had probably been widowed, leaving her to attempt to tend a farm entirely on her own—on her own, that is, except for the company of her only daughter Charlotte.  In Earl, Hannah found a replacement for the husband she had lost on the farm. In Hannah and Charlotte, Earl found replacements for the family he’d lost when first Theresa died and then Danna passed away. For Earl, it was a time of returning to the farm, with new expectations borne of difficult experiences.

Did Earl live happily ever after? I wish there was a simple answer to that question. I can tell you only that there is evidence (or lack of evidence) for either that conclusion or its opposite. Listen Earl Baldwin is buried beside Danna Baker Baldwin in the same cemetery where they buried their daughter Theresa in 1911. He lived the remainder of his life in Washington County, although there is no trace of Hannah (or Charlotte) beyond their brief enumeration in the 1930 census. Did Earl and Hannah divorce? Or live joyfully together for decades to come? That, I cannot say. I know only that Earl died in 1962, having reached his 84^th birthday. He lived and died attached to the farmland, community, and family connections of Washington County, New York. He may or may not have lived the life he planned; we can only hope he eventually embraced the life he lived.

Like any cemetery, the Auburn Pioneer Cemetery (previously known as the Slaughter Cemetery) is scattered with monuments of various shapes and sizes. Standing prominently among them is an oversized but otherwise innocuous boulder. This very large rock does not mark a grave, but affixed to its face is a simple bronze memorial plaque. It reads, “In memory of the Pioneers of Slaughter.”

“In memory of the Pioneers of Slaughter”

Although the prominence of this monument is unexplained, it seems straightforward enough—a common sentiment toward a community’s founders. Pretty bland, in fact. What could it possibly have to do with white supremacy?

Like so many of the monuments under discussion currently, the story doesn’t come into focus until you begin to ask when these monuments were erected and why. In this case, the rock itself was placed in the early 1960’s as an act of defiance. At that time, Auburn was moving forward with a plan to widen and straighten Auburn Way, and the improved roadway would require space from the western edge of the cemetery.

When first announced, this plan didn’t inspire much controversy. After all, the cemetery, at that time, was known informally as The Japanese Cemetery—a remnant of the vibrant Japanese and Japanese-American community that was sent to prison camps, just twenty years earlier, for the duration of WWII. At the war’s end, local civic groups formed in Auburn to discourage the newly released families from returning to the White River Valley. These efforts were largely successful. It’s estimated that only one in ten Japanese families ever returned to our area. The remaining Caucasian population had little concern for gravesites of people that many still viewed as the enemy.

But as the plans for the roadway progressed, local groups realized that the cemetery still included more than just Japanese graves. Although most Caucasian burials had been moved to Mountainview and other local cemeteries as they opened (because of flooding at the old cemetery downtown), there were still a handful of burials representing some of Auburn’s earliest white settlers—“pioneers,” in other words, a label that was clearly not intended to include the early Japanese arrivals to our area. The thought of disturbing these important “pioneer” graves, unlike expendable Japanese graves, was a great affront to Auburn’s white community. It was only then that resistance to the road project began to foment. The protests ultimately culminated in the placement of the oversized boulder directly in what would have been the bulldozer’s path.

Although Auburn abandoned the plan to straighten the road at the expense of the cemetery, the community felt they should do more to ensure the cemetery’s on-going protection. It was then that they held a brief ceremony to formally re-name the cemetery, not “The Auburn Cemetery,” but “The Auburn Pioneer Cemetery,” to underline the presence of important graves of the community’s white founders in perpetuity. At the same time the plaque we see today, also honoring the community’s “pioneers,” was placed on the stone that ultimately prevented these white graves from being disturbed. And so it sits today, a memorial to the fact that even in death, our Japanese neighbors were never seen as important as their white counterparts.

Landscaping encroaching on Jizo, August 2016

It was more than four years ago now that the City of Auburn announced that they had engaged the services of a professional historian to produce a landmark nomination for the Auburn Pioneer Cemetery. Once completed and accepted, this document would thereafter serve as the City (and King County’s) officially endorsed history of the cemetery.

This decision wasn’t exactly a surprise, but I will admit I was stunned by the communications (or lack thereof) that the City indulged in during the period they planned for this event. Based on this red flag, I decided to not pursue a role in the process, but wished the best success for their consultant. I was happy that a professional would be handling this important matter, although I was dubious about how adequately she’d be able to research the complex history of this very unique place during the six months before the draft was due.

That initial deadline was missed. More than a year after that deadline, I realized I still hadn’t heard anything regarding the overdue nomination. I contacted the supervising department at City Hall to request an update. They didn’t respond. So I contacted the mayor’s office—and was again ignored. I contacted the director of the White River Valley Museum to ask what the status was. She did respond. But her response, oddly, was only that she had no idea what the status was.

So I continued to wait, realizing that, if the process was taking this much time, at least the resulting nomination would be as thorough as it possibly could be.

And I continued to wait.

And wait.

After three full years, and knowing that the City had already demonstrated that it was not interested in responding to requests even from one of its own citizens on this topic, I made a decision to take the County at their word that “anyone” may nominate a location for landmark status (KCC 20.62.050a) and submitted my own draft nomination. I honestly didn’t want to take on the project at this point. My goal instead was to spark what might have been an awkward communication from King County to the City of Auburn asking them to please get their shit together; otherwise, the county commission could end up in the unenviable position of having to deal with two separate nominations for the same cemetery at the same time—or worse, accept a sub-par “citizen” nomination if the City’s promised professional version did not soon materialize.

I, of course, have no idea if such a conversation ever took place. I do know, however, in the matter of a couple of months, I was advised that Auburn’s professional consulting historian had finally brought the project across the finish line. Halleluiah! Now I would see what her fee and four years of waiting had bought.

So, here at this point, you may be thinking I’m ready to perform an autopsy, holding each dissected part of this document up to the light in order to expose and measure its flaws. And that’s not what this is about. Yes, I have some major disappointments with this document: chief among them that there was evidently no attempt to translate the approximately 100 kanji tombstones which comprise the heart of the cemetery. Together, their transcriptions amount to a primary resource which was completely ignored only because it was evidently inconvenient, over the course of four years, to engage a translator. I know of no professional historian who would say that all primary resources should be consulted, unless they are written in a language that you don’t personally speak. The nomination now moving forward contains inaccuracies that would have been revealed had this obvious step been taken. Of course, translating the tombstones (not to mention the kanji that virtually covers the flanks of the jizo statues) is, to my way of thinking, something the City of Auburn should have done years if not decades ago. They took over the management of the cemetery by 1965, yet never thought it was in anyway important to know the names and dates on the tombstones? Even today? Auburn really hung their consultant out to dry on this one.

But that (and other issues) aside, the nomination form is what it is: a compilation of existing resources (the English-language ones, at least) that ticks all the required boxes. In that finite respect, it is thorough and it is well written. Parts of it are quite impressive. The consultant certainly did a far better job in producing the nomination than I would have had the patience to do. And, most of all, it will carry forward the landmarking process, belatedly endowing the cemetery with the protections it certainly deserves.  And I remind myself that, at the end of the day, this is what is important.

So that said, why am I writing this manifesto today? Mostly to highlight that the City of Auburn made this one of the least transparent and least inclusive exercises I’ve seen performed by city government. Their disinclination to respond to even simple requests for updates is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m not even going to attempt to document every instance of their failure to communicate because it would serve no purpose here other than to try your patience—it’s a pattern with roots reaching all the way back to 2011 when I first raised the question of obtaining landmark status for the cemetery with the Julie Koler (then of King County’s Department of Natural Resources & Parks). And my fear is that the City is going to follow this same M.O. moving forward.

With official landmark status, the City may now have access to funds to initiate any number of projects at the cemetery. I’ve heard mention of ideas from restoring the Jizo statues to even renaming the cemetery to acknowledge a stronger connection to the historic Japanese community. My concern is that, as happened in the nomination process, these projects too will be done in an information vacuum. There is no evidence in the nomination whatsoever that there was any attempt to interview or even contact the living people who are the diaspora of the Auburn Pioneer Cemetery—the very community whose history the process was meant to preserve. Their family experiences, their input—their very right to be informed—were completely ignored during the nomination process. With no researched investigation into what they might be able to add to the historic record, they were deemed irrelevant to the process.

There is the tendency among cities to believe they have exclusive purview when it comes to matters of recording cemetery history or moving forward with restorations. After all, they are acting with good intentions in representing the best interests of the family descendants. Or at least they assume they are. And cities often feel no obligation to confirm the veracity of this assumption. After all, we live in a mobile society; people move away. Many descendants made that choice and, by doing so, they lost the right to express their opinions on cemeteries they rarely, if ever, visit.

There’s something to be said for this practical stance, or at least there was during the days before online genealogy databases and Google searches. Today, it’s not all that difficult to trace the descendants of those buried in what appear to be abandoned graves. And if there’s any doubt that we should, we need to remind ourselves that in the case of the Auburn Pioneer Cemetery, these families didn’t simply make a decision to move on to greener pastures. They didn’t leave to pursue their own agendas. They left only because we exiled them, en masse, because of our own wartime hysteria. To now exclude them with a shrug from these processes is to penalize them—again—for the discrimination that our community inflicted on them in the past.

So, Auburn, if your plans include restoring Jizo statues, please tell me you’re planning to contact Tora Kato’s living, vibrant descendants to advise them of your intensions. If you are going to rename the cemetery, please tell me you’ll contact the living, concerned descendants of Madison Hopkins, James Hart, and George Scott (all of whom are interested in this cemetery as an outgrowth of their own family research) before making any final decisions.  Tell me you’ll proactively make a fully translated transcript of the cemetery readily available for the living, caring descendants of the Togamis, Sagaras, and Otsujis—instead of just filing such a document (if you ever produce it) away in the museum’s research library.

In the case of the Japanese community, we are the sole reason these families initially lost contact with their ancestors’ resting place. We don’t get to now behave as if we have an exclusive right to make decisions affecting their family plots because they aren’t here to speak on their own behalves. We don’t get to assume that our best intensions equal their best interests, no matter how obvious we believe this conclusion to be.

We need to do better, Auburn. We need to do so much better.

Kristy Lommen

Founding Member Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Association of Gravestone Studies

Editor, Auburnpioneercemetery.net website

We had a dusting of snow last night. There is something so evocative about cemeteries in snow.

Our most recent project is the creation of a photo catalog of the kanji tombstones in the Auburn Pioneer Cemetery. This is an important project—because so many of these stones (over 100) were poured from the same mold, it is difficult to tell them apart. They all, of course, have individual inscriptions, but to those of us who are not Japanese speakers, it’s difficult to distinguish these stones by their inscriptions. Add eight or nine decades of weathering, and the stones start to lose almost all sense of identity.

To remedy this situation, we invited a friend and professional photographer—Cherie Renae of Monmouth, Oregon—to visit the cemetery last year to create a photo record of each stone’s inscription. Using special lighting and computer enhancements, Cherie was able to create a set of high definition photographs that, in almost all cases, are far more legible than even the stones themselves when viewed in situ.

Our vision is to create a catalog page for each stone including a large reproduction of its high-definition photograph (a sample page appears below). The page will also include a “row detail” across the top of the page that illustrates the stone’s location relative to the English-language tombstones in its vicinity. A box for the translation is included along the side, followed by any notes regarding the individual (or their family) that we might know from sources beyond the tombstone inscription itself.

We envision providing a copy of the finished catalog to the office at the Auburn Mountainview Cemetery (which administers the Auburn Pioneer Cemetery) as well as the White River Buddhist Temple, which has historically represented Auburn’s Japanese community. Both are called upon regularly to field genealogy-related requests, and this catalog should assist them in fulfilling that role, as well as helping descendants in locating an ancestor’s specific tombstone.

Our final purpose is one we hope will never be needed: to help identify and/or restore stones that are stolen or vandalized—a situation that occurs in cemeteries far too frequently. As of this date, if a set of these kanji tombstones—displaced for any reason—had to be restored to their original positions, there would be little documentation available to assist in accomplishing this task. This catalog should provide cemetery personnel with a tool to aid in their restoration efforts should such a sad eventuality ever come to pass.

In summary the goals of this photo catalog project are:

1. To provide translations of kanji inscriptions on these tombstones

2. To provide the most legible record possible of untranslated elements for possible future translation (kaimyo names, primarily)

3. To preserve the information from the inscriptions beyond the life spans of the stones themselves (most are now over 80 years old and exhibit various stages of erosion)

4. To provide a tool for non-Japanese speakers to locate specific stones in situ at the cemetery

5. To preserve the historical elements of the inscriptions (nengo date notations, old-style kanji, warashi/mizuko designations) that reflect the culture of Auburn’s historic Japanese community at the time the cemetery developed

6. To provide a tool to assist cemetery personnel to repatriate or restore these tombstones if such a project ever becomes necessary

7. To instill an appreciation for the unique community that these stones represent by more tangibly associating them with the individuals and families who uniquely contributed to Auburn’s culture and history

Although the project is in progress at this point, we would be happy to hear from any descendant of the families represented among these graves if they would like to have a copy of the page featuring their family’s tombstone(s) for their own records. Please contact kristy@lommen.org for further information.

Learning a second language is a bit like returning to childhood. One finds oneself chanting an unfamiliar alphabet until it becomes second nature while, at the same time, immersing oneself in the endless process of acquiring new vocabulary words, just as a toddler does. Eventually one learns to read from books that are mostly pictures, returning to childhood realms of scaly dragons or perhaps small animals dressed in fetching Victorian frocks. From there, chapter books eventually wean the leaner off of imaginative illustrations and onto weightier texts and subjects.

This was the position I was in several years ago as I learned the Esperanto language. I had passed the picture book phase and was ready to take on chapter books that could more fully develop a story. The books I found included titles such as La Sorcisto de Oz, La Adventuroj de Alicia en Mirlando, and even Winnie-la-Pu. The same familiarity that might have helped you identify these titles as The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Winnie-the-Pooh helped me find my way through the narratives. Comprehension goes up immeasurably when one knows the general direction of the story. In fact, I wasn’t sure I was ready for a novel-length book—even a children’s book—that didn’t offer me that comforting air of familiarity. But that’s precisely when I discovered Bela Joe, an antique Esperanto book offered for sale in an online auction. I took a chance on this unfamiliar book and placed a low-ball bid. As you might imagine, there is very little competition for children’s literature in Esperanto, and the book soon arrived at my door.

Although I had never heard of Bela Joe (or Beautiful Joe, its title in English), I discovered that it was a best-seller in its day. Originally published in 1893 by Canadian author Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe was, in fact, the first book to ever sell more than a million copies in Canada. It was the story of an unloved puppy born in the run-down stable of the horse who pulled the morning milk wagon through their small hometown. The cruel milkman who owns the stable abuses his animals, eventually killing all of Joe’s littermates (described in horrific detail) before turning his evil attentions on poor Joe. In a drunken rage, the milkman pins Joe, calls for a hatchet, and hacks off the helpless puppy’s ears and tail. The disfigured, desperate puppy is then rescued by the children of a neighboring family. Because his appearance is so appalling, they give him the ironic name “Beautiful Joe.” The remainder of the novel recounts Joe’s gratitude for his new family and his adventures with the adoring children—told in his own words.

Interesting subject matter for a kids’ book, don’t you think? I’m not sure any modern day publisher could be convinced to market such a dark story as children’s literature. But in the late 1800’s, publishing a book like Beautiful Joe wasn’t just a good idea, it was actually just one example of a growing genre of similar, first-person narratives told from the perspective of abused animals—a genre that had been spawned, single-handedly, by the resounding success of a similar novel published in 1877: Anne Sewell’s Black Beauty.

Although you probably haven’t heard of Beautiful Joe, there is little doubt that you have at least a passing familiarity with Black Beauty. It’s the imaginative story of a horse, told in his own words, who was born on a bucolic farm in England. The story begins with his memories of his mother and companions living an idyllic life on an estate where they are well cared for and happy. Unfortunately, Beauty’s fate soon takes him away from rural comforts; he is brought into the midst of urban squalor in London, forced to earn his keep pulling a carriage under the most depressing and difficult circumstances.

Sewell describes in great detail some of the common practices in the carriage horse industry of her day, always from the perspective of the helpless animal forced to endure them. She describes how the fashion of the times called for docked tails on horses, and the pain this procedure caused as it was inflicted without any medications. She also took issue with the practice of using blinkers (those piratical eye patches frequently attached to bridles) to partially block the horse’s vision; through Sewell, Beauty complains about how awful it is to perform his job under this needlessly inflicted sensory handicap. But perhaps most harrowing is Sewell’s description of the bearing rein, a piece of harness that runs from the bit in the horse’s mouth through the top of the bridle and then down to his withers, creating a sort of pulley system. The leverage created by the rein forces the horse to hold his head up and keep his neck fully arched, an unnatural position that prevented horses from leaning forward into the work of pulling. The resultant air of military attention appealed to the fashion-conscious Victorians, but the impact on horses, over time, was crippling. And all of this was so much easier for readers to grasp when told from the victim’s own viewpoint. In fact, the outrage spawned by Black Beauty resulted in a movement to ban the bearing rein altogether.

Unfortunately, as with most experiences from early childhood, we tend to forget such details and retain just the feelings they inspired. When we think of carriage horses, we tend to think of them as pitiful, tortured creatures, suffering at the hands of uncaring humans. We don’t pause to analyze if the circumstances that lead to these conclusions are still valid, if they ever were. And since few of us have any direct experience of the lives of carriage horses, this legacy of pity and outrage that has been handed down to us by Black Beauty remains the single, unchallenged—perhaps even unconscious— source of our beliefs about the lives of these animals. It has become immutable part of the hive-mind for those of us living outside of the world of working animals.

Because of the current controversy in New York surrounding the fate of the Central Park carriage horses, I’ve given some thought to the seeds of outrage that Anna Sewell unknowingly planted with her best-selling novel. I’ve been analyzing Jon Katz’s photos of these horses to help guide this analysis. Since I live on the opposite side of the country, this is as close as I can reasonably get.

In Katz’s photos, I see no evidence that carriage horses are forced to endure tail docking. But is this because the practice was recognized as cruelty or because it simply passed out of fashion? Do we physically alter other animals to satisfy the whims of fashion? Certainly there are dog breeds that traditionally endure ear docking even today. Unlike in Victorian England, these procedures are presumably carried out by veterinarians and under anesthesia. Some animal lovers would argue passionately that the practice is nevertheless cruel, but, since there is still enough demand for the practice that it endures, it would be difficult to reach that categorical conclusion. Regardless, since we no longer dock carriage horses’ tails, it’s a moot point.

Sewell described Black Beauty suffering from the restricted vision resulting from the use of blinkers. I see blinkers present in every photo that Jon Katz has published of carriage horses in harness. If the practice of restricting a working horse’s side vision is cruel, why does it persist today?

The answer, of course, goes to the anthropomorphism of animals. When we imagine ourselves laboring in the streets with artificially restricted vision, of course we’re alarmed. How could any person be expected to carry out his work efficiently—or even safely—under those circumstances? But have we ever considered the impact of sensory stimulation on horses? Anna Sewell, unfortunately, lived far too early to review the studies that eventually explored this issue. Certainly Dr. Temple Grandin, in far more recent times, has helped the public to understand that reducing sensory input endured by animals in stressful situations, is, in fact, one of the more humane things we can do for them. She has revolutionized the livestock industry by designing processes and equipment that intentionally limit stimulation. Blinkers on horse bridles operate on the same, ultimately beneficial, principle. Some may think them cruel, but we could just as easily argue that forcing horses to work in an urban environment without their benefits would be the real cruelty.

Bearing reins, despite the ardent intensions of Sewell’s fans, also persist into the present day. I’m no expert on horse tack and livery, but such reins appear to be evident in several of Katz’s photos. That said, they do not appear to be employed to force the horses into maintaining an unnatural posture. Unlike the illustrations from Sewell’s day, the reins in Katz’s photos appear to have a great deal of slack between the top of the bridle and the horse’s withers. Without interviewing carriage drivers, I couldn’t tell you what their true purpose is, but I suspect it’s the same as the reins used on any riding horse—to establish communication between the animal and the human, a means for the human to communicate direction to the horse or to tell him when to slow or stop. It does not appear that the rein is being used to force the horse to “stand at attention.” I see no evidence of cruelty by its presence in these photos.

Black Beauty obviously had a profound impact on the carriage horse industry, but, even more importantly it touched a nerve with the general public. It virtually propelled the nascent Humane Society movement from sleepy beginnings in England across the Ocean to North American and even beyond to Australia. Beautiful Joe, in fact, was written as a contest entry for one of these early societies in New England; the society had sponsored a writing contest in order to generate sympathy for the sorts of animal cruelty highlighted in Black Beauty (which is why Beautiful Joe was set in Maine rather than the author’s native Canada). Even in the few years between the publication of the two books, the carriage horse had become such an entrenched symbol of animal cruelty that Saunder’s created the tone for Joe’s “autobiography” by first describing the horrendous conditions and treatment endured by the friendly milk horse in scenes already potently familiar from Black Beauty. Saunders actually referenced the presence of Sewell’s book in the home of Joe’s saviors. Even by that time, less than 20 years after Black Beauty was published, the carriage horse had become the virtual poster child of the entire humane movement.

This legacy was built on unshakable narratives, delivered by appealing and pathetic first-person protagonists and served to most of us at a time in childhood that predated objectivity or analysis. In some cases, the narrative had been designed to support specific political goals. For better or worse, carriage horses remain firmly harnessed to Black Beauty’s legacy even today. If these modern horses require liberation, perhaps we can make an attempt to liberate them from our own childish beliefs built on the agendas of a previous century. Only then can we begin to look at their circumstances with any semblance of objectivity.

By the time Chiyokichi Natsuhara established himself in this country with a wife and family of his own, his parents had passed away back in Japan. Realizing that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to offer prayers at their graveside to honor their spirits, Chiyokichi erected a stone to their memory in the Auburn Pioneer Cemetery.  It’s prominently located in what is today the Natsuhara family plot at the front of the cemetery’s original Japanese section.

Such a memorial, erected at a place other than the burial location of the remains, is called a cenotaph. When erected in cemeteries, cenotaphs can be virtually indistinguishable from actual gravesites, often causing confusion as to who exactly is buried in the cemetery. Despite the potential for confounding future generations, cenotaphs are not uncommon in American cemeteries; they seem to be especially popular in cemeteries that served Japanese American communities in the early part of the last century.

It seems odd that practicing Buddhists would be inclined to erect these monuments. Their death and burial rituals are focused on releasing the deceased person’s spirit from the corporeal body and physical plane of existence. Unlike Christians of that earlier era, Buddhists had no expectation that the dead would literally rise again at a final judgment. On the contrary, they practiced cremation—even though it was considered both an exotic and suspect practice by their white neighbors—to destroy the body and encourage the spirit to depart the physical realm.  Cremation was such a strongly ingrained part of Japanese culture, that even Issei Japanese who converted to Christianity would usually still follow traditional cremation practices.

The assignment of a “kaimyo” at death is an extension of this Buddhist outlook. The “kaimyo”—a sort of posthumous name that the person would be known by in the afterlife—was assigned by the priest at the time of a Buddhist’s death. The belief was that the spirit would be continually drawn back to the physical realm as the surviving friends and family inevitably invoked the name that served that person during their physical life. By changing the name to a new, unfamiliar name at death, this unintended nagging of the dead was cleverly avoided, allowing the departed spirit to more fully separate from its former, physical existence.

After death, the deceased was honored with prayers—prayers often transported to the person in the spiritual plane on the ephemeral smoke of burning incense. Prayers to the ancestors were frequently offered at home alters specifically maintained for this purpose.

With this emphasis on the spiritual rather than physical existence, it might seem odd that cemeteries and tombstones played even a nominally important role in the lives and deaths of early Japanese immigrants, yet they certainly did. In addition to home alters, prayers would be offered in the public venue of the cemetery, especially during community events such as Obon Odori festivals.  Likewise, a public monument recording the deceased person’s name, kiamyo, and date of entry into the spirit realm (in other words, the date of death), was an important remembrance, not just for the family, but for the community at large. And while these monuments usually served to mark the burial place (or, in the case of Buddhists, inurnment place) of the physical remains, that function was actually incidental. The main emphasis was on establishing a place of both private and public remembrance of the deceased person’s time on earth.

As a result, erecting a tombstone in a local cemetery to serve as a memorial and ad hoc alter for offering prayers and burning incense was an important feature of Japanese burial practices, even when the loved one’s cremated remains were not present. Cenotaphs were erected in the Auburn cemetery for precisely this reason. After the local Japanese community was displaced due to the internment of World War II, many families erected cenotaphs in cemeteries in the communities they gravitated to at the war’s end.

Most people are well aware, as they search cemetery records for traces of their family history, that the absence of a tombstone does not necessarily mean that there is no body there. What we also have to remember is that, just because there is a tombstone present, one cannot necessarily conclude that it marks a burial location.

Alternate post title: Dr. Ruby Hirose, American Chemist and Microbiologist

Dr. Ruby Hirose. Acc. 90-105 – Science Service, Records, 1920s-1970s, Smithsonian Institution Archives.

This photograph of Dr. Ruby Hirose has been maintained for decades in the archives of no less than the Smithsonian Institution. Although undated, the associated copy and her evident age would suggest it was taken in the mid-1940s when she was working in the Midwest for Merrell Laboratories. She was probably in her late 30’s or early 40’s at the time it was taken and had long since earned her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Cincinnati.

As Dr. Hirose worked tirelessly to advance vaccine technologies to improve the quality of life of her fellow Americans, her father and siblings were imprisoned in American internment camps for the crime of having Japanese ancestry at a time when Japan was our enemy. Why wasn’t Dr. Hirose herself subjected to similar confinement?

Only Japanese and Japanese-Americans (62% of those interned were American citizens) residing on the west coast were subject to internment during the War. Had there been any possibility that a Japanese submarine could have docked silently off the coast of Ohio under the cover of darkness, nearby Japanese communities would undoubtedly have been viewed as potential spies for the Japanese Empire—just as they were on the west coast—and “evacuated” to the most remote and harshest corners of the country until the War’s end.

While we might like to believe that Dr. Hirose was exempted from internment due to her status as a full-fledged American citizen or because of the importance of her work to her fellow Americans, such was sadly not the case. Only an accident of geography kept Dr. Hirose from enduring the same fate as the rest of her family during the War.

Dr. Hirose died in Pennsylvania in 1960, having never married. She was survived by one brother and two sisters. One sister, Toki, was married to Dr. Isaac Kawasaki of  Hawaii; he is credited with suggesting to General Emmons (the Commanding General and Military Governor of Hawaii during the War) that interning the Japanese in Hawaii would be the wrong course of action—not on constitutional or moral grounds, but simply because it would have been impractical. The General evidently heeded this advice; there was no “evacuation” of Japanese or Japanese-Americans from Hawaii—despite the attack on Pearl Harbor that initiated the war with Japan.

After her death, Dr. Hirose’s brother and sisters arranged for her remains to be returned to Washington State. She is buried in the family plot alongside her parents in the Auburn Pioneer Cemetery.

Full summary from the Smithsonian Archives:

Biochemist and bacteriologist Ruby Hirose researched serums and antitoxins at the William S. Merrell Laboratories. In 1940, Hirose was among ten women recognized by the American Chemical Society for accomplishments in chemistry, and later made major contributions to the development of vaccines against infantile paralysis. The original caption to this photograph read: “A hay fever sufferer herself, Dr. R. Hirose, American-born Japanese girl scientist on the research staff of the Wm. S. Merrell biological laboratories, has found a way to improve the pollen extracts used to desensitize hay fever sufferers. … The idea of treating the pollen with alum to increase its effectiveness developed while Dr. Hirose was working on alum-precipitated toxoid for protection against diphtheria.