SEQUIM — Two grave markers were apparently removed when crews built a wooden fence on the edge of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe’s cemetery, tribal chairman Ron Allen said last week.
By Friday, the fence had been taken down.
The owner plans to build a new one according to tribal specifications.
The headstones from the graveyard on Jake Hall Road disappeared due to “a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding,” said Allen, reached on Tuesday while he was in Washington, D.C., on business.
David McDonald, the Sequim dentist who is remodeling a large home on Todd Road adjacent to the cemetery, wanted to replace the barbed-wire fence between his land and the graveyard.
He said he phoned Allen last spring to gain permission to tear down the old fence and build a new barrier.
Allen said he granted McDonald permission to put up a new fence exactly where the old one had been.
Instead, McDonald’s workers built the fence several feet north of the old fence line and onto cemetery property, Allen said. In clearing away brush, “they removed some grave markers,” the chairman added.
“A couple of them were very old markers,” he said.
Neither Allen nor McDonald knew whether the markers could be recovered.
Nor did Allen know whether graves were otherwise disturbed during excavation done before construction of the fence.
“We were upset, without a doubt,” said Allen, who learned of the problem last Monday. “Our burial sites are very important.”
But the chairman did not seem angry at McDonald.
“These things can happen. Mistakes can be made,” Allen said.
Fence torn down
McDonald, after meeting with tribal council members last Tuesday, called the fence issue “a non-event.”
“The old fence was falling over,” McDonald said.
To him, the cemetery looked like it needed care.
“I tried to clean it up really good,” he said.
“The mistake I made was not getting them out there to look at it.”
Allen said that a tribal staff member, while doing maintenance work at the cemetery last week, discovered the new fence had been built beyond the old line.
McDonald promised to have his wooden fence torn down, and by Friday it had been removed.
McDonald added that he would build another fence according to the tribe’s specifications.
“I want to do everything I can to make it right,” he said. “I didn’t know there were graves.”