Helena’s China Row Cemetery
In 1870, Helena, Montana featured a Chinese community of almost 700, comprising more than 20% of the city’s total population in that year. Very little physical presence of Helena’s once thriving Chinatown remains after urban renewal during the 1970s. However, the cemetery plot used by Helena’s Chinese community still exists, testifying to the once large community. From 1892 to 1955 more than two hundred members of Helena’s Chinese community were buried in China Row, a section of land adjacent to Forestvale Cemetery. While Forestvale Cemetery, which houses the remains of many prominent early leaders of Montana, is well-maintained, China Row sits outside the formal cemetery boundaries and has been reclaimed by the prairie. Though more than two hundred people were interred in China Row, today only a handful of headstones remain to indicate the initial use of the cemetery.
In keeping with Chinese cultural traditions that a person’s remains would be exhumed five to ten years after initial burial to be returned for reburial in the home village, China Row shows extensive evidence of this practice with depressions dotting the land indicating where remains were exhumed. The 1881 article from the Helena Independent details the process of exhuming, cleaning, and returning bones to each individual’s home village for reburial in ancestral plots. This process continued into the 1940s.
Elfreda Paulson, wife of the caretaker of Forestvale Cemetery, remembered that in the early 1940s, “A member of a Chinese Society came to Mr. Paulson, presented his credentials, and asked for permission to open graves of certain Chinese. This was done at the bearers’ expense. The remains were packed in designated boxes . . . to be taken to San Francisco and there transported to their native China.”
The images below show the altar at Helena’s China Row Cemetery. This altar was used during burials to burn offerings to the recently departed and during annual festivals such as Qingming Festival in the spring when tombs are swept, cemeteries cleaned, and offerings given to departed ancestors. The watercolor was painted by Helena resident Bob Morgan, who remembered witnessing several burial services at China Row during his childhood. The painting is housed at the Montana Historical Society (Untitled (Chinese Altar) Robert Morgan Watercolor on paper, 1993 Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society, 1995.78.01).
Note the deterioration of the alter from Morgan’s memory of it when it was in working condition to the present.
The headstones pictured below are from the China Row Cemetery in Helena, Montana. Each of these has been translated and the home village in southern China located. For details on each location in Helena, see the map linked here. For the locations of the home villages in southern China, click here (red markers indicate home villages for members of the Chinese community of Helena).
