In 1996, a few days before my first day working for the Department of Defense, my 62-year-old mother came apartment hunting with me on Fort Ord, a closed military base near Monterey California. She called it a ghost town, and it was—filled with desolate, boarded-up buildings which had deteriorated soon after being emptied two years before.
Being a creative writer, Fort Ord's decrepitude quickly grew on me, and the seed of a historical mystery began when I discovered a pioneer cemetery. When asked how I found the tiny Whitcher cemetery among the sand dunes of the East Garrison of Fort Ord, I answer honestly that I don't remember, and instead end up telling the person about my j-o-b as an editor of military tests. Typically their response is, “that sounds interesting." The truth is that it definitely isn’t, and that's exactly why I became possessed with the need to know the story of the small, well-hidden graveyard of an unknown pioneer family named Whitcher.
During a break from the tedium of entering commas and various punctuation marks on a computer, I'd go for a drive, which I often did during lunch hours, or whenever the silence became too much at the former Silas B. Hays hospital building, now full of government workers. The Big-G factory is the tallest structure at Fort Ord, filled with hundreds of worker bees silently doing their jobs. Frequently, I simply had to hear a song, any song, only cranked on high, as I cruised down the dirt roads and overgrown trails of long-departed soldiers. I'd imagine what used to be there: cavalry troops and farmers tirelessly homesteading the land, instead of the vandalized, crumbling Army barracks.
Since then I've been researching county records, newspaper archives, court documents, and family treasures to piece together the Whitcher's story. I know that at least three of their children are buried at East Garrison. Two are still questionable: a puny, broken-off headstone with just the initials "H.W." and a grave marker for Mary H. Pearson 1899 – 1935. I'm fairly certain Mary's not in the cemetery, but only have a theory about “H.W.”
Join me in my historical search for the missing pieces of the puzzle. Maybe together we can figure out the question that's been bouncing around my head for over a decade, “Why are children buried on Army land?”
Stay tuned as “Unknown,” the Whitcher story, unfolds!
G.M. Weger, March 2009
