Carson City construction site possible home of Chinese Cemetery

When they were laid to rest over 100 years ago, four of the the six people unearthed Friday were buried, not in the east to west direction common of Christian burials, but laying in a north to south direction.

As best as anyone knows with what limited history there is on the site, the small, triangle-shaped parcel across Roop Street from Lone Mountain Cemetery has always been known as the Chinese cemetery.

Kenny Fraser, a Lone Mountain cemetery caretaker, said recently he had looked over cemetery maps and "as far as we know, there is no one buried there."

Friday, a group of construction workers proved city officials wrong. There were bodies there, and it wasn't likely to be just six random burials, one bystander noted.

One of the skeletons had nails on top of it. Several seemed to by lying on some sort of a white substance. The north to south direction is a prime indication of a traditional Chinese burial, said Sue Fawn Chung, associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Chung, an expert on Chinese history, said traditional Chinese "geomancy," now known as feng shui, called for Chinese to be buried laying north to south as part of an ancient tradition.

Chinese sometimes buried their dead with some of their favorite items, not expensive things, but items like a favorite pipe or a pair of glasses. Sometimes nails were put on top of the body to ward off bad spirits. Sometimes they were laid on beds of lime or rice. It's not a sure sign of a Chinese burial, Chung said, but that combined with local rumor of the site are compelling arguments for the area to be the Chinese cemetery.

"In Carlin, the cemetery originally belonged to the Chinese," Chung said referring to a similar situation in Carlin. "Because of immigration exclusion acts and other immigration laws, the population of immigrations drastically decreased (in the late 1800s). The people who would have normally taken care of the cemetery no longer paid taxes on the property, and it was up for grabs. I suspect the same thing happened in Carson City. The only question that remains are how many bodies are in that section and what do you do with the bodies?"

In the late 1800s, Carson City had a rather large Chinese community, said State Archivist Guy Rocha. Carson's Chinatown sat between East Second and East Fourth streets on the north and south and from Fall Street on the West to east of Valley Street. The Supreme Court, Legislative parking garage, the state Printing and Employment, Training and Rehabilitation buildings and a parking lot cover most of what was Chinatown, Rocha said.

He said that of the 3,042 people lived in Carson City in 1870, about 23 percent, 697, were Chinese. By 1888, almost 1,000 Chinese were living in Ormsby County, most of them in Carson City. However, with the decline of the mining industry around the turn of the century, Carson's Chinese population dwindled to 152 in 1900 only 20 in 1940, 10 in 1960.

It is unknown how long the Chinese cemetery has been abandoned. Chung said some common items associated with Chinese cemeteries are missing like grave markers, mounds or some sort of structure in which to burn paper. Chinese burn paper representing items the deceased can use in the afterlife.

"Chinese traditionally believe there are two spirits," Chung said. "A living man has two souls and when he dies, one ascends to heaven and the other stays in the Earth. But, if the one that is on the earth is unhappy, it will bring malevolent spirits who are supposed to do harmful things until they're pacified."

Chung guessed that mostly males were likely buried in the local cemetery. Because of immigration laws that forced women to prove they weren't prostitutes, it was almost impossible for many Chinese women in the late 1800s to immigrate, Chung said. Popular belief is that the Chinese would dig up their dead after a year or so and return the bones to China, the idea being that the stay in the United States wasn't permanent.

"It was expensive to send them back to China, and you had to have relatives there," Chung said. "Only certain ones would be sent and reburied back in China, those with money and family."

This isn't the first time one of Nevada's Chinese cemeteries has been disrupted, Chung said.

"Any time you remove someone from their burial site, it bothers me," Chung said. "But this has been done throughout the state of Nevada."

In 1996, a Carlin property owner unearthed several coffins containing Chinese remains. The area around the site produced 13 coffins, which Chung said probably weren't all the remains in Carlin's Chinese cemetery considering it was a railroad town.

Chung was called in to read the inscriptions on bricks found with some of the remains. The bricks, which contained the the name, date of birth and death and the person's home in China, allowed her to positively identify the three of the bodies.

Three others were tentatively identified based on death records. While the state has no jurisdiction over grave sites on private property, property owner Randy Meierhoff allowed the graves to be excavated. The city of Carlin has offered to bury the remains after university studies on them are completed.