Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery

The cemetery's earliest recorded burial occurred in 1846, when pioneer Emmor Stephens, father of J.B. Stephens, was buried on the family donation land claim that today lies on the east side of the Willamette River across from downtown Portland. In 1854, J.B. Stephens sold the property to Colburn Barrell, with a condition that Emmor's grave be preserved.

In April 1854 the steamboat Gazelle exploded at Canemah, near Oregon City, killing twenty-four of its roughly fifty passengers, including Barrell's business partner Crawford Dobbins and his friend D.P. Fuller. Barrell set aside ten acres of the Stephens land as a burial ground for the explosion victims and named it Mount Crawford in his partner's memory. Plots in the cemetery were initially sold for $10.

A group of local families later acquired the property and renamed it Lone Fir, reportedly after a solitary fir tree that stood on the otherwise treeless grounds. By 1866 the site had expanded to roughly thirty acres. Burials grew rapidly through the second half of the nineteenth century, fueled in part by the diphtheria, scarlet-fever, and typhoid epidemics that swept Portland and disproportionately killed children. The cemetery contains an estimated 25,000 burials, including those of sixteen Portland mayors as well as Chinese-American laborers whose section was for many years unmarked and is now the subject of an active interpretive project.

Lone Fir entered a period of substantial neglect between roughly the 1960s and 1990s, when funding lapsed and headstones suffered vandalism and weathering. The Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery, founded in 1999, led a stewardship campaign that helped secure listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. The cemetery is now operated by Metro and remains an active site of community history programming.