Washington Old Soldiers Home Cemetery Orting
1301 Orting Kapowsin Highway
Orting, Pierce County, Washington 98360
360-893-4515
The Washington Soldiers Home and Colony is located on 181 acres in the beautiful Puyallup Valley near Orting. Established in 1891, this was the first of three homes built for Washington state veterans.
The cemetery is on the grounds of the Washington Soldiers Home.Veterans have been buried there since it opened in the 1890s. Even though there are over 2,000 veterans in the cemetery, the site has largely gone unmaintained due to a lack of funding over the last several decades.
The current site of the cemetery is not the original. According to local historians, the first site was in the floodplain of the Puyallup River which holds runoff waters from Mount Rainier. Washington State bought additional land for the newer cemetery in 1907 and moved graves to the current location sometime before World War II.
Originally, the cemetery was located in the area now used as the baseball field; a nice, flat, area that might appear a perfect location for a cemetery. Unfortunately, the water table is about two feet below the surface in that spot, which meant that our departed honored military personnel were effectively receiving an aqua burial. Many found this to be unacceptable – so much so that residents were choosing to be buried elsewhere. In the early 1900s, this led to an attempt to move the Home. Fortunately, two Orting businessmen—J. C. Taylor and James O’Farrell—came to the rescue and arranged to move the burial ground to a new location and in 1905 Paul Koehler became the first person to be buried there.
Mr. O’Farrell bought the land and made the necessary improvements to make it a perfect location. He effectively became Orting’s first undertaker and owned and maintained the cemetery for the next twenty years. After twenty years he left Orting and leased the land to a person, or persons, unidentified, who failed to maintain the property and even managed to lose all of the records. According to Ms. Adventures, “…in a few years, the record states the cemetery was in worse condition than when [O’Farrell] had bought it.”
The town of Orting bought the property in 1937 and began the arduous project of restoring it. Again, as per Ms. Adventures, “According to Margaret Groff, the Town Clerk of that time, ‘the whole thing was a mess.’” Because the records were missing, they had no way to verify who had purchased plots or who was buried where. A map was eventually made by, “two town employees who crawled all over the grounds, measuring and getting names from tombstones.” If you go there today, you will see a well-kept, peaceful resting place.
Hidden and almost lost to view under the growth of trees and vines, mere feet from the south side of Orting-Kapowsin Hwy. is an old stone stairway leading up into the cemetery, forgotten it seems since a newer drive-in entrance was built.
Directly across the Orting-Kapowsin Hwy. there is still productive farmland, but it seems to be being devoured by housing developments. How long can it hold out? Time will tell, but my belief is that the developments will win in the end.
Orting, like many other small cities, is bound by Urban Growth Boundaries set as a condition of Pierce County’s 1990 comprehensive plan for growth management, RCW title 36.chapter 70A. As a result, the only expansion of commercial properties within the city must come at the expense of farmland, and much of the productive farmland in the Orting Valley is already under houses and asphalt – with more about to be paved over.
The Soldiers Home in Orting, Washington has been in existence since June of 1891. A cemetery was built along
with the Soldiers' Home to serve as the final resting place for Veterans and their spouses.
The current site of the cemetery is not the original. According to local historians, the first site was in the flood
plain of the Puyallup River which holds runoff waters from Mount Rainier. Due to flooding, Washington State
purchased additional land on a nearby hillside for a new cemetery in 1907, and existing burials were relocated to
the new site.
In 1909, hundreds of veterans, citizens, and state and military officials attended the dedication of the Soldiers'
Home Cemetery Monument in the new cemetery. The inscription on the large memorial stone read: "Erected by
the Women's Relief Corps of the Department of Alaska, June 23, 1909"
Medal of Honor Recipients:
The Soldiers Home Cemetery is the final resting place of four Medal of Honor recipients for their heroic actions
during the Civil War. It might be expected to find a cemetery with four Civil War Medal of Honor recipients in
Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, Bull Run, or any of the storied battlefields of the south or eastern states. But this
little cemetery in the far northwest corner of the country is truly remarkable as the final resting place for these
heroes.
They are (in the order they received the award):
• George L. Houghton, Private, Army, Company D, 104th Illinois Infantry, Elk River, Tennessee, July 2,
1863
• Alexander U. McHale, Corporal, Army, Company H, 26th Michigan Infantry, Spotsylvania Courthouse,
Virginia, May 12, 1864
• Albert O'Connor, Sergeant, Army, Company A, 7th Wisconsin Infantry, Gravelly Run, Virginia, March
31, 1865
• William H. Sickles, Sergeant, Army, Company A, 7th Wisconsin Infantry, Gravelly Run, Virginia,
March 31, 1865
Incredibly on this hill in Orting, there are five Medal of Honor recipients, all former residents of the
Soldiers Home and Colony. The other recipient, John Warden, is up the hill about half a mile in a family plot in
the Orting Cemetery. Corporal Warden received the award for “gallantry in the charge of the volunteer storming
party on 22 May 1863, while serving with Company E, 55th Illinois Infantry, in action at Vicksburg,
Mississippi.”
