GIVING DEAD A LIFE

Volunteers dig through history to give those in Pioneers Cemetery Identities

The Arizona Republic, Saturday, September 27, 2003.

Dust comes before the rain.  Near the state Capitol, standing graveside inside Pioneers Cemetery, looking eastward, a layer of sand fills in the outline of downtown Phoenix.  The dust storm scrubs away at the buildings.  For now, they stay.  No one knows what the passage of another century will yield or tear down.  Time nearly wiped out the memory of the earliest pioneers buried here at what is now the Pioneer & Military Memorial Park at 14th Avenue and Jefferson Street.

One woman, Marge West, has faced off with time for two decades.  If she hadn't paced the weed-choked gravel grounds 20 years ago, if she hadn't meticulously written down each name from every visible headstone onto an index card, there would be no evidence of the people here, buried in the park that consists of seven historic cemeteries dating back in the 1870's.

They call West the "guru."  At first, she could only make out 600 names.  Now, with the help of Diane Sumrall, who travels from north Scottsdale a couple of days a week, the two have calculated that there are more than 3, 660 names.  Others from the Pioneers' Cemetery Association chipped in, but West and Sumrall are the stalwart volunteer researchers.

The two credit Algona Winslow, an association member, with visiting mortuaries and copying down old records by hand.  A man named Thomas Hayden, who surveyed the gravesites in 1938, trying to log the dead, had done previous work.

All this helped, but it wasn't enough.

West and Sumrall journeyed through miles of old obituaries dating to the 19th century and death certificates from the Arizona Territory searching for clues of those who died and locating where they were buried.  The last of the cemeteries closed in 1914.

Back then details were sketchy.  Documents penned with ink looked like script.  "We had to figure out how to make people interested, find out about the people who are buried here," West says.  "Essentially, we found out this, the history of early Phoenix."

There is some lore, says Sumrall, that there is a mass grave where they buried those they couldn't identify.

The oldest headstone they've charted is 1871.  His name was William Pinckney Murray.  "We don't know why he came," West says.  "He was here a short time; his daughter Anna married John Alsap, the first mayor of Phoenix."  "I get into these people," West says.  ""She's been living with them for 20 years," Sumrall says.

Living with them indeed:  Madams and miners, ministers and mothers, soldiers, a surgeon general.  And a Japanese cook.  The cook, I. Torigoe, worked at a local ranch and became mesmerized by a gun hanging in the kitchen.  He inadvertently was shot in the face while he and his friend played with the gun.

West, 77, and Sumrall, 60, uncovered these names and cobbled together their stories through old records:

Felicianna Baker
Only 16 months and 13 days old when she died of poisoning after she ingested morphine pills, a common "household product."

Clarence Proctor
A Buffalo Soldier, a sergeant in Troop L of the 10th U.S. Cavalry during the Spanish American War.

Lindley Orme
Moved to Arizona in 1870 and was elected Maricopa County sheriff in 1880, 1882 and 1891.

Freddie Tovrea
Who died of appendicitis.  He was the 10-year-old son of rancher E. A. Tovrea, owner of Tovrea Castle.

Rose Gregory
Known as Minnie Powers, owned The Powers, a saloon and lodging house where West and Sumrall believe she was a madam.

The hardened desert has equalized all of those buried here, the less famous and the infamous, even Bryan Philip Darrell Duppa, who is credited with naming Tempe and Phoenix.