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Introduces Sunnyside Cemetery and traces the island's earliest history, from Vancouver's exploration to Isaac and Rebecca Eie's arrival and the first permanent settlement. It also covers the hardships of pioneer life and Rebecca Eie's early death.
Sunnyside Cemetery overlooks the rich Farmland of ab's prairie where many of the cemetery residents were born lived and died Sunnyside provides them a peaceful and beautiful final resting place this film is dedicated to Roger Sherman his family ofpioneers and their descendants past and present hard work and dedication to Sunnyside Cemetery as well as love for their Heritage and whby Island history have played a huge role in preserving this cultural
treasure in April of 1792 British Explorer Captain George Vancouver commanding his majesty ship Discovery sailed into the Straits ofwuka he would soon name every island Waterway mountain and point of land he could see on this Voyage Vancouver's sailing Master his Navigator discovered and named Deception Pass proving the adjacent land mass to be an island Puget sound'slargest Island an island Vancouver named after its Discoverer Joseph Whidby good land for cultivations is abundant on this island I have taken my claim on it and now I'm living on the same if Rebecca the children and youall were here I think I could live and die here content Isaac eie in a letter to his brother Winfield
1851 the donation Land Act of 1850 brought Isaac eie to Whidby Island where he became the Island's first permanent settler it was set up by Congress so that anyone that came and permanently settled on the land built acabin lived here so long u they could claim 320 acres for free which was a fabulous deal eie and his wife Rebecca together claimed a 640 acre parcel the land they claimed was Prairie natural grass land Rich Farmlandready to plant which to this day is known as EES Prairie Isaac eie uh claimed that land in 1850 it was 640 acres it was one square mile and it was the only donation land claim in the areathat did not lay North and South it was it was taken so that they got the best Prairie Land they didn't want to clear the Big Trees off of the lands the early 1850s saw new settlers arriving fully
involved building homes cabins and barns planting Orchards food Gardens harvesting Timber and sawing Lumber 1853 saw the founding of CP Bill one of the oldest towns in what would become Washington State founded by Captain Thomas Coupe and hiswife Maria Coupe is also justifiably well known for being the only person ever to sail a full rigged sailing ship through perilous DEC reception pass pop was also sailing Master on Puget sound's first Revenue cutter the Jefferson Davisbut some settlers like Rebecca eie didn't Thrive loneliness with her husband frequently away on extended government business to Olympia the constant struggle to win a living from the land fear of raiding bands of clinks or hias from thenorth and her own fragility all conspired to wear her away she was not a healthy woman uh died of of uh tuberculosis and um she was 30 years old had three children and it was just just a tragedy
Saturday May 21st Mrs Doyle is ironing I am very lean and feel sometimes like my stay on this Earth will not be very long but the will of the Lord be done in all things I will leave allI hold dear here into his special care Oh may he watch over them and protect them Rebecca eie 1853 they had a comfortable home back East uh they came from from Illinois and then the husband would come outhe was going to be the big Explorer and they were going to get all this land and they were going to be rich and and all the rest of it and then the women didn't have much choice theyhad to join them and so they did and and Rebecca she she was just she had a child while she was here and she was just playing a sick woman her daughter was called Hedy and Hedy lived to
be 7 years old and and uh so many people died from consumption now we know it is as tuberculosis but uh it took so many of our children at that time the Colombian 29 October 1853 Mrs Rebecca eiewife of Colonel Isaac eie resident of Woodby Island Washington territory on 29 September 1853 died of consumption Mrs eie was from Skyler County Missouri she crossed the plains in 1851 to rejoin her husband in Oregon and was thefirst white woman that settled on the island she has left a husband and three children to mourn the loss of a companion and mother and her death has occasioned a void in the community which will long be feltand
Describes the 1856 conflict with northern Indians and a firsthand account of a frightening encounter during the Indian War. The chapter ends with the 1857 killing of Isaac Eie and the immediate aftermath.
regretted in 1856 a tribe of Northern Indians came down and that was their custom these Northern Indians were mean uh warfaring Nations and they came down every summer to take what they wanted from this area mainly mainly slavesand uh so they came down in 1856 and they managed to kill a white man and so our government took a a warship a Navy ship and they went down to the encampment of the northern Indians it wasa cake Indians and they wanted them to surrender and uh be tried under the white man's law and they said no and so they shelled The Village killed several Indians including a chief so the cake tribe went backto Alaska and that winter they decided that they needed to take revenge chief for a chief or a Tai for a Tai and theydid Mother and we four girls made a visit to the Crockett family sometime in 1856 it was during the Indian War while we were all bathing in the sound off Whidby Island an immense canoe filled with Northern Indians
in war dress suddenly swung around a point of land in the Cove where we were bathing at sight of these Indians my mother realized that as the wife and family of the governor of Washington territory we might proveto be invaluable as hostages realizing this we started at once for the Crockett home which we reached shortly Mrs Kate Stevens Bates daughter of territorial Governor Isaac Stevens
it was just after dark at the Isaac eie Homestead on a warm quiet August evening in 1857 eie his children his second wife Emily with her daughter Anna along with family visitors George and luri corus were aroused about11:00 the dogs outside began barking Colonel eie went out to ascertain the cause of the disturbance and immediately a shot was heard in a second or two he appeared at the window at the back of the house andmotioned to those within to go Outdoors as he raised his hand in gesticulation they noticed that one finger was gone they all ran toward the woods except Mrs corus who started up the road toward my house she knockedloudly at our door and immediately told us what had happened we took our guns and started back with her arriving at the house we found all silent the headless body of their victim was lying in the yard we
went down to the beach nobody nothing there when daylight came there was not a sign of life on the water as far as the eye could reach and the cruel murderers had left no track by which they couldbe traced William Ballinger
Explains Isaac Eie's importance in the region, the building of blockhouses, and the role of the Engle family in preserving local history. It then follows the Eie family line to Mary Eie Bozarth and the founding of Sunnyside Cemetery.
angle Isaac eie was was a pivotal figure in the Puget Sound region in in indeed Oregon Territory from the time he arrived in the early 1850s until his death he was someone who was thought to be the nextterritorial Governor he was acquainted with every organization and major figure in the area and when he was murdered in 1857 it was one of those events that everyone remembered what they were doing and where they were when theygot that news that's how traumatic it was at that time everybody started building protection which was the blockhouses and here in central Whidby we're fortunate have four blockhouses that remain and and these are log structures that were builtto repel Indian attacks and that's out of the original nine these blockhouses have been refurbished and and we happen to have one in Sunnyside Cemetery we call it the Davis block house it was actually built as a residence
and it's only block house with a fireplace in it the blockhouses are important uh part of of our history and the nicest one is is downtown Coupeville by the Historical Museum the Engle family was one of the firstfamilies to settle here right after the EES and it was their house that people went to for help the night that Isaac was murdered um WB Engle was renowned as a farmer but probably the more um interesting characterin that family was Flora Flora Pearson Engle she not only took care of the lighthouse as a young woman but she was a writer and her writings about those people are often the the reference point for historians todayFlora Engel um and her husband had several children and and uh the descendants of those families are still here in coupville and uh in fact uh uh portion of them are are still farming the same land that her
and her husband did okay my great-grandmother was Flora Augusta Pearson Engel she was born in New Hampshire in 1850 and came to Whidby Island in 1866 she came here as a 14-year-old with her mother and it was duringthe period of time when AA Mercer was recruiting girls from Back East they called him the Mercer girls and he made two trips and Flora came out on that boat on the second trip and Mercer was looking forfamilies and particularly women to travel to the Northwest because at that time this area had nine men for every woman and they were in desperate need of teachers Cooks seamstresses and whatever else a woman could contribute to theirhousehold she never did consider herself to be a Mercer girl she was only 18 when she arrived here she had no intention of getting married her dad was a ligh housekeeper at uh at admiralty head at Fort Casey
and uh she was the assistant and so she did most of the logs and and that type of thing but she's also an attractive uh young unmarried woman and so it was said that there were times when therewere as many as a dozen horses tied up to the picket fence out there on a Sunday afternoon and she'd entertain him she was musical she could play the piano and they'd all sing and so anyway she finallypicked out a a Bachelor Farmer that was here older than herself and was married but it wasn't until she was 25 years old so she must have been having a good time as a as a hold out thetwo of them were married on May of 1876 up in Victoria took ay mooved to San Francisco and then came back here to live he died I think it was about 30 years before she did but she became
a major part of the community uh she was ah head of the ladies of the Roundtable um she uh when when they couldn't afford a minister anymore in the Congregational Church she became the minister and ran the churchuh she traveled uh quite a bit and and remember this was in the 1930s and the best part is is that she remembered all of that history and she recorded it and she wrote articles in the local paperand various things so uh she was a very major part of our community she was a very staunch member of her church and so she walked from where they lived in the house there on the on the cornerof EB road to the church and walking up the hill well there were no sidewalks and all too often it would be muddy and there was a number of times where she actually walked out of her gashes and
so she got tired of having to put up with this and so she went across uh to commo Island to the lumber mill that was there and talk them out of donating scrap Lumber and then she talked tosome of the local SCA captains and got them to pick up the lumber and bring it into the dock in cville and then she Twisted the arms of the local farmers at any time they had taken a loadof something down to the dock would they please bring this Lumber out and along the hill and so finally she got the farmers in to build a sidewalk from Prairie Center to the top of the hill so shecould walk to church without having to lose her gashes or end up with her skirts all muddy Winfield eie uh died in 1865 he was 33 years old and he was the first one in this Cemetery Winfield eie
was the the chronicler of the eie family his Diaries uh recount their stories and also the history of this place in a way that's quite profound his last remaining sibling Mary eie Bozarth meets his um remains delivered tothe beach at E's Landing she buried him in a corner on their farm and it was her wish that uh they could have the family up here because part of the family was already buried down Deb's landing andso anyway uh she succeeded eventually uh those bodies down there were exed and brought up here when uh uh Mary buried her brother here she decided that that since there was no County Cemetery that this should be itand so she sold uh one and a/4 Acres of the corner of their Farm to the county for $1 and that was the beginning of sunyside Cemetery John coog was an an amazing figure he became a doctor with
Focuses on John Cough and his unusual role as a traveling doctor and cemetery landowner, then shifts to the later history of the Eie property and Frank Pratt's preservation efforts. It concludes with the 1911 steamboat fire and the burial of two seamen in Sunnyside.
minimal training which was the way things were at that time but he was known as the canoe doctor because he traveled from present day watom County all the way down to Seattle Olympia whenever anybody needed medical help heum he was the one that when the Knight Isaac eie was murdered he was the one that they came for but he was out tending to a patient and so that they moved up the beach to the eieresidence instead he um he was a real far-reaching individual because of him Sunnyside Cemetery was formed alongside the original EB graveyard in the early 1870s when he first came here and took a donation claim in 1852 which includedall of the ground around Fort Casey he was not healthy and and he thought that this climate would uh you know maybe make him better and he decided he was going to be a farmer that that was a
healthy life and and maybe he could could do better here well problem was is that they didn't have any doctors here and he was the only doctor so he was in heavy demand and and so uh he wasgone days at a time he uh was afraid of the northern Indians when they came down so he when he built his house he buil built it on Smith Prairie which is miles in from the water and hehe ended up retiring in in Seattle but one thing that he did is that he bought the first addition to this cemetery and it's called Sunnyside Cemetery Edition and uh interestingly uh you know how many doctors own theirown cemetery and also interesting is is that he isn't buried in his own Cemetery he's buried on the old uh original graveyard following the establishment of the eie graveyard in 1865 Mary eie Bozarth the last member of that
family is living up on that hill by herself and she's incredibly lonely and Incredibly missing all of her family she dies in the early 1870s and the lamb passes to her daughter Elmyra Enos Elmyra held on to thatproperty until the early 1900s when a man named Frank Pratt came by and he was totally taken with the incredible beauty from Sunnyside farms and persuaded Elmyra to sell that land to him Frank Pratt U was a manof money and he came here in the early 1900s and bought up hundreds and literally hundreds of Acres he was a millionaire even in those days so during the Depression he had a yacht he had a Teakwood yachtI believe it was Teakwood tied up at good beach my dad got to ride on that boat my dad was Edwin got to ride on that boat when he was a teenager got to go to Seattle that was
a fabulous trip for him he talked about it for years and years and years he bought up all of what we now call Parago Bluff and Parago Lake uh he bought the fery house uh down near E's landingand uh he uh was somewhat of a historian because he he protected our history uh he protected some of these old structures like like the fairy house U he kept roofs on it and so it wouldn't deteriorate hepaid for two elaborate monuments to Mark where the EB house was and the Sunnyside Farm after his death in the 1930s um his only son Robert uh was a key figure in this area he was a a lonelyman in terms of he wasn't really engaged with the community um on a deep basis but he cared deeply about this community much of it still looks the way it is because he refused to develop his property and
when he died in 1997 and they brought him to Sunnyside for um his burial it was one of the most profound um funerals I've ever been to up there because the family had meant so much to the waythis place looks and why in
1907 uh we had a new Steamboat buil in coupville called the the Whidby and uh it was spelled without an e uh and that's the way Whidby was spelled in those days and and she was a 110 ftlong a beautiful boat uh she ran the route between uh Woodby Island in Seattle making several stops and this was a daily run and then she'd spend the night in in OK carber where the waters were calm mostof the time well in 1911 uh at night she cut fire at the dock and they cut her loose to save the dock and which they did and problem is is that there was two seen sleeping aboard andthe birthing quarters were forward underneath the the deck and they didn't get out so the county buried him here in Sunnyside cemetery and uh they had two wood headboards and the wood head boards uh haven't done very good
over the years and but these two uh were saved they had red off but they were saved and and we assumed that that was because our first caretaker that started doing some maintenance here uh his father was theskipper of the Whidby the night it burned so anyway uh I always tell the the sad story of the two seamen because we don't know where they came from we couldn't notify families
Describes changing burial customs, the garden cemetery movement, and how Sunnyside reflects the region's social history. It highlights Chinese and Native American burials, then closes by reflecting on the cemetery's deep connection to local families and everyday life.
nothing with the change in how people view death the way they bury the dead changed as well small village cemeteries were replaced by something known as rural cemeteries or the garden cemetery movement these were planned burial places outsideof town with winding paths and family lots that would hold 10 members of of a family surrounded by ornate fencing um sometimes steps into the plot and often the family's surname engraved on the stairs as well and thiswas adopted by the families here in the community early on and it's reflected up at Sunnyside it Sunnyside has one of the most eclectic examples of burial in Washington State anywhere that I've seen
my mother's side of the family had a a chinan working for them and his name was aut and uh he had a shack down on the lower part of the lur Farm down in ab's Prairie and uh whenhe was old uh nobody knew how old he didn't either but uh my grandfather took care of him my family those third family were Christian family and they treated him as part of the family and uh he's buriedin their lot and so we're kind of proud of that because he's the only Chinese that's in the cemetery with a with a mark grave the so-called indigents of that time who were heavily discriminated against were if theywere buried in the cemetery it was usually around the perimeter somewhere um so he was loved by grandchildren and great grandchildren and all of the children that he could round up and he used to go into Seattle and
which made the merchants unhappy because most of the China bought from their own people in the city and he'd bring candy back for all the kids and and Mom my mother can still remember that and uh they theywere loved by the children but there was a lot of people that didn't love them uh they discriminated against them uh they uh a lot of the merchants wouldn't hire them uh they were able to rent ground andthey they raised potatoes and things like that Native Americans here once they adapted to the non-native way of bearing um they're dead they pretty much kept um to themselves if if they did bury them they they would umoften take them up to the swinish reservation after um treaty Time In 1855 the last native family to live in this area was Alec and Susie Kettle and their children um Elson and Charlie and they lived here through
the 1930s and 1940s and they're buried up at sunnide but they're buried alongside the fence line um or what isn't it what was the fence line the cemeteries expanded West from that point since they were interred there butthat was the place that um Indians were allowed to be buried was along the fence line there's actually more than a few Native Americans buried up there but they were never given headstones and so the only ones thatyou see when you walk that West fence line is Alec and Susie Kettle and and their children Sunnyside cemetery is one of the most unique places in Washington State it's it's a place that you can track the entirehistory of this state from preon time um when natives lived here for thousands and thousands of years to the present day it it holds the stories of um immigrants that crossed the Oregon Trail against Great odds of people
that immigrated from Ireland to Australia and Tasmania and then ended up here in the 1850s it's it's the story of women and how they made it in in times when they weren't afforded full rights as women it's thestory of ethnic minorities that struggled and suffered and somehow got by it's the story of remembrance and commemoration and what's most remarkable about Sun side I think is the visual tie it has to this community where people thatlive here can look up on that Hill every day as they go to the store or to work and see where four or five generations before them are in um my very good friend lilan huffstetler once wrote anamazing um piece about the cemetery because five generations before her up there she said I had my start there near E's landing at Aloha Farm which is where my mother Uncle brothers and sisters were born E's Prairie is
one of the most beautiful places in the world my favorite view of it is from Sunnyside Cemetery the colors of the fields change from season to season from black soil to Greens to Golds and tans and Browns SunnysideCemetery overlooks the valley and my family is buried there parents both sets of grandparents great grandparents Aunts Uncles sisters and many cousins I will be there too someday and last year we took her up there and she's therewith the rest of them so it's pretty amazing how this place ties to um everyday life down here and how the people here tie to that up there on the hill
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