During the rush to claim and develop Washington following westward immigration in the 1850s, much of the evidence of the young state’s past was erased. There are few tangible links to the earliest pioneers and the native people who came before.

Often the few places where “any evidence of the people who started the community still exist” are in cemeteries, historian Theresa Trebon of Continuum History and Research said during a recent presentation in Coupeville. She said Sunnyside Cemetery, which overlooks Ebey’s Prairie on Central Whidbey, is one of the state’s most historically important sites, but also provides the community with an invaluable link to the past.

“I’ve been to a lot of cemeteries,” said Trebon, jokingly adding, “probably more than most funeral directors, and Sunnyside is very special.”

In observance of the Memorial Day weekend, local historian and author Roger Sherman is giving a guided tour of Sunnyside Cemetery Sunday, May 25. The Sherman family has been caring for the cemetery since 1921.

Anyone who has walked the rows of markers on a clear day can guess how the original farm, and then the cemetery, got its name. The hillside overlooks the farming land of Ebey’s Landing and out to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Olympic Mountains beyond.

Trebon was commissioned by the cemetery district to write a history of Sunnyside Cemetery a few years ago. She said she was able to uncover “a great deal of information” and dispel some misconceptions about the site. She returned to Coupeville last weekend to discuss the history of the graveyard and the historical significance of cemeteries in general, a lecture she gives for the Inquiring Mind Lecture Series for the Washington Commission for the Humanities..

“The history of Sunnyside Cemetery,” Trebon writes in her report,”is inextricably linked to the Ebey family.” The cemetery began in 1865 when Winfield Ebey, the brother of pioneer Isaac Ebey, was buried in the northeastern corner of the Jacob and Sarah Ebey farm. Family members who passed away before him were buried at another site, but later moved to Sunnyside. In later years the cemetery grew as Dr. John Kellogg and Win Cook each developed their own cemeteries alongside.

Yet the cemetery, which was originally known as Ebey Grave Yard, contains monuments that tell the remarkable story of one pioneer family, like so many forgotten others, that suffered immense hardship in creating a new community. The names and dates on the stones of the Ebey family plot tell of many lives cut short.

Trebon said the Ebey family followed their son Isaac to Whidbey in 1854, coming across via the Oregon Trail, and within the space of 12 years all but Isaac’s sister, Mary, had died

Winfield Ebey, for example, and his older sister, Ruth, both died at the age of 33. In 1862, Ruth was picking berries in the area located on present day Scenic Heights Road, got lost and wandered too close to Blower’s Bluff. The cliff gave way and she fell to the beach.

In 1864, Winfield left the family’s Sunnyside Farm and went to California, hoping to recuperate from tuberculosis. He died the next year and his body was brought back to Whidbey. Trebon said Winfield’s sister, Mary Ebey Bozarth, unknowingly started the future Sunnyside Cemetery by burying him at the northeast corner of the farm.

“Here are the markers,” she said, “that tell how the state was founded and tell of the hardships that were endured.”

Trebon writes that Sunnyside Cemetery is one of the oldest cemeteries from the state’s territorial period and is especially significant since it is “a rare, and largely intact, example of mid-to-late nineteenth century graveyard practices.”

Trebon, however, also points out that cemeteries offer a somewhat skewed history of communities because of the graves they do no contain. She said few Native American graves are in Sunnyside Cemetery, despite significant Indian presence in the community, as graveyards were often segregated places in the past.

She said the remains of the many Chinese immigrants who helped settle the area are also missing since most were likely shipped back to China, as was the custom. The Chinese people often belonged to burial societies. Each year a man, the so-called bone scraper, would travel from Washington to California and exhume bodies, which were sent for burial in the homeland.

Yet Trebon said Central Whidbey has a historical and cultural treasure in Sunnyside Cemetery. She spoke of how the graveyard holds evidence of how life, death and burial customs changed over time. She pointed out that older family lots, surrounded by fencing and curbing, “replicated the structure of the home.”

The cemetery has evidence of how fraternal organizations of the late-19th century, like the Oddfellows and Masons, helped improve the community’s quality of life and death. Many of the older tombstones are also reminders of the dangers of child birth and high infant mortality rates, which Trebon said is estimated at 40 percent in the late 1800s.

The very existence of the cemetery, Trebon said, is an example of how deaths went from being family matters — with private cemeteries on each family farm — to become community concerns.

After all, she pointed out that Memorial Day has its roots in something that started in cemeteries nearly 140 years ago. “Decoration Day” was started by the Grand Army of the Republic to honor the Union dead of the Civil War.

Take a ‘sunny’ tour

Spend Sunday afternoon wandering through Central Whidbey history. Local historian and author Roger Sherman will present a free, guided tour through Coupeville’s Sunnyside Cemetery Sunday, May 25, from 1 – 2:30 p.m.

Directions t

You can reach News-Times reporter Jessie Stensland at jstensland@whidbeynewstimes.com or call 675-6611.