Committee looks at creating new cemetery

The Whitefish City Council unanimously approved creating an Ad Hoc Cemetery Committee at their Jan. 18 meeting. The committee will look into developing a new cemetery. The committee’s seven members will be appointed by the mayor with council approval.

The city cemetery on U.S. 93 West by the golf course has 3,079 lots and 184 crematory sites, but they’re all sold and privately owned, and the city has a waiting list. As a result, several community members recently have been buried outside the city.

Nina Laird told the council she moved to Whitefish 40 years ago and recalls reading at that time that all the plots in the city cemetery had been sold. She pleaded for the city council to take the problem more seriously this time.

“If we can have a dogpark and a skatepark, we can have a cemetery,” she said.

Mayor Mike Jenson noted that when the city purchased the land now used for the dogpark and softball fields back in the 1950s, it was intended for use as a cemetery. But the land has high groundwater, and use for a cemetery was ruled out, he said.

Jenson said a group of interested residents have been looking at about 10 acres of city-owned land on the east side of the Whitefish River between the Rocksund Trail footbridge and the city’s sewer treatment plant as a new cemetery site.

Public works director John Wilson noted that the sewage plant “doesn’t always smell good,” but Jenson pointed out that a “nice subdivision” is located nearby, and the residents there don’t complain about smells.

The Whitefish community raised $675 in 1917 to purchase the land for the current city cemetery from the Whitefish Land Co. Before the cemetery opened in 1918, “Whitefish citizens buried their dead in Kalispell, Columbia Falls, in the woods or even in back yards,” according to Betty Schafer and Mable Engelter in their local history book “Stump Town to Ski Town.”

The city annexed the city cemetery in 1979, and the Whitefish Lake Golf Association currently maintains the site.