Gravestone confounds Pendleton gardener

Of all the things to find in one’s yard while gardening, a gravestone might be the most eerie.

A Pendleton man puttering in his garden on May 25, 1993, discovered a headstone about four inches underground and just inches from his home on Southwest First Street while moving irises from the front yard to the side yard. When Oran Rodan’s shovel hit what sounded like a rock during his digging, what he uncovered instead was a headstone marked “Dee Freeman Horwitz.”

The iris relocation project was put on hold while Rodan pondered the obvious question: Is Dee Freeman Horwitz also in my yard?

The stone indicated that Horwitz was born in 1886, but there was no date of death inscribed, so Rodan doubted that a grave had been dug there. But just in case, he stopped digging and called the Pendleton Police Department to investigate. “I didn’t want to bother the guy,” Rodan said, ‘if he’s down there.”

Police officers contacted Olney Cemetery, but officials there couldn’t help since the discovery was made on private property. And the cemetery had no record of Dee Freeman Horwitz ever being in the cemetery.

Genealogist Garland Wilson of Milton-Freewater found no record of Horwitz being buried in any Umatilla County cemetery, and he speculated that the headstone had been brought to Pendleton from someplace else. Stolen grave markers from as far away as Portland have been found in Umatilla County, Wilson said.

Rick Wylie, owner of Wylie Monuments, said that grave markers with misspellings or other errors are sometimes cast off and turn up in unusual places, and are even sometimes used as garden stepping stones.

However the stone ended up in Oran Rodan’s yard, he wasn’t too concerned. He planned to leave it where it was, saying, “It don’t bother me. He ain’t gonna hurt you.”