Pet cemetery in Kent has fallen into turmoil, disrepair
KENT – Frank Guo trudges through overgrown grass and fallen leaves on a chilly afternoon, making his way toward where his beloved French bulldog is buried.
He passes dozens of other graves, marking the lives of retrievers, tabbies, birds, even a lion, all laid to rest in the quiet, tree-lined expanse. At this cemetery, rubber balls are placed between the burial sites instead of bouquets, and gravestones are graced with photos of furry faces.
Finally, Guo stops.
“This is the spot,” he says, pointing to an unmarked patch where his 3-year-old Henley’s cremated remains lie. “You can’t even see it anymore. There used to be a little cup on top of it where you could put flowers.”
Unlike most animals at the Seattle-Tacoma Pet Cemetery, Henley doesn’t have a gravestone or memorial marker, even though he was buried more than two years ago. Instead, there’s an empty space in the grass.
It’s not the tribute Guo, 30, agreed to when he paid $1,800 for full burial services. But he doesn’t know with whom to check in, or how.
In fact, Guo hasn’t been able to reach anyone who runs or owns the pet cemetery since 2022.
The space is sacred to many pet owners in the Pacific Northwest and beyond, and for more than 70 years has offered a place to grieve and honor lost members of the family. But cemetery patrons say there haven’t been any new burials in about two years, despite requests, and communication around the property has worsened, leaving many to worry about the future of the community landmark.
“I’m very angry,” said Scott Guthrie, of Lacey, Thurston County, who has buried four of his pets – three Malteses and a Pomeranian – at the cemetery over the past decade. “I wanted all my dogs buried together. But I can’t reach anyone there now,” said Guthrie, 63.
Other problems have surfaced, too, particularly around the construction of a 100-foot cellphone tower in one corner of the memorial park, said Julie Seitz, who leads Community and Friends of Seattle-Tacoma Pet Cemetery, a group of cemetery patrons and supporters that advocates on behalf of the space.
“We believe this is an amazing, culturally significant memorial park to many cemetery patrons,” Seitz said. “We see so many important reasons to save it. We just continue because we believe in this so much.”
A forever place
The memorial park, formerly known as Pet Haven Cemetery, was established around 1950, making it the oldest of its kind in Washington, according to the King County Landmarks Commission.
The 2-acre site, at 23646 Military Road S., wasn’t intended as a forever resting place for the region’s furry and feathered loved ones. But that all changed in 1949 when a friend asked Dean and Nellie Marlatt, who ran a funeral home in Kent, if he could bury his cat in the 5-acre tract they had just bought, the Seattle Times reported.
The first few years were slow, but by early 1955, there were nearly 100 burials at the cemetery, according to local newspaper coverage at the time. The Marlatts added cremation services as business picked up, and by the late 1970s, the number of burials exceeded 2,000, the Times reported.
In 1964, Times reporter Don Duncan described the space as a “colorful garden of flowers, shrubs and potted plants,” decorated with Easter lilies in the spring and Christmas trees around the holidays. Some pets were buried in silk-lined caskets, while others rested in simple cedar boxes, but “all plots receive perpetual care,” Duncan wrote.
A few local celebrities have been laid to rest there over the years, including Little Tyke, the vegetarian lion from Auburn known for her gentle personality, and who starred in movies and splashed onto the Times front page in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Alisa, the 2-month-old goat mascot of Lucy Mayberry, a self-announced presidential candidate in 1960, was also buried at the cemetery.
But most of the grave sites are dedicated to dogs and cats. Many include heartfelt messages. For Fluffy, who died in 1981: “There’ll never be another you.”
Buehler, who died in 1978: “The Best of Us All.”
Wheaton, who died in 2011: “If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever.”
Snuffer, who died in 1968: “She was happiness.”
In 2000, after Dean Marlatt’s death, his wife eventually sold the property to Louis Clarke, who had been the cemetery’s caretaker for several years. Clarke sold the property to Julie and Steve Morris, who run J.K. Morris, LLC, in 2012.
Five years later, the Morrises leased the cemetery and cremation business – but not the property – to Canada-based Gateway Services, but the agreement expired in 2022. As of now, ownership of the property and business belongs to J.K. Morris.
But since the Gateway lease expired, patrons say the cemetery has fallen into neglect, adding to their grief.
“I wanted a place that was protected,” said Guthrie, who’s had two other dogs – Cheegu and Peachie – die in the past couple of years. He wants to bury both at the Seattle-Tacoma Pet Cemetery with the rest of his dogs, but hasn’t been able to reach anyone to set up burial services.
“I was not expecting this,” Guthrie said. “If I knew this was going to happen, I never would have spent all that money.”
The Morrises did not respond to multiple phone and email requests from the Seattle Times for comment.
It was even more insulting to patrons, when in 2020, an AT&T cell tower went up in the back corner of the cemetery. Construction of the tower sparked a yearslong battle between property owners and those who want to see the space preserved. Many tower opponents, mainly cemetery patrons, neighbors and supporters, call it a “desecration” of the memorial park and continue to fight for its removal, Seitz said.
And because the cemetery is also home to the cremated remains of more than 20 pet owners, some argue the tower violates state law prohibiting the use of a cemetery for noncemetery purposes.
But from the state’s and county’s perspectives, there’s not much to be done now. The state Department of Licensing, which licenses cemeteries, does not consider the site a human cemetery, and King County says it was unaware of the human remains until after the cell tower’s construction permit was issued.
In 2022, community organizers asked a King County commission to recognize the cemetery as a historic landmark, which it did, protecting the site from further development and making it the only pet cemetery in the county with the designation.
“Cemeteries are for the living, to have a place to be with your extended family and your ancestors and gather and take care of them,” said Sarah Steen, landmarks coordinator for King County Historic Preservation Program. “And this counts for beloved pets as well.”
Zoning confusion
Who regulates a pet cemetery? Is that different than for a cemetery for humans? What if there are some human remains within the pet cemetery?
These are the questions Seitz – who cremated her black Labradors, Lovey and Kuma, at the on-site crematorium in 2017 – has combed through with other patrons in the last five years. Those inquiries eventually landed the cemetery in the middle of King County’s once-a-decade planning process, facing a web of complex zoning and code considerations.
Every 10 years, the county updates its Comprehensive Plan, the primary policy document that covers development regulations, land use, transit, sewers, parks and trails. Around early 2022, the team received a request related to the Seattle-Tacoma Pet Cemetery, said Chris Jensen, King County’s comprehensive planning manager.
In the request, community supporters asked the county to consider changing the pet cemetery’s land use designation and zoning classification – technical codes key in dictating what types of activity are allowed on the property, Jensen said.
The pet cemetery sits on a property with an I-P zoning classification, which means it’s considered an “industrial” property. Cemetery, columbarium and crematory use are prohibited on I-P properties, Jensen said.
The land used to be zoned with an NB classification, for “neighborhood business,” but it was reclassified as “industrial” in 2001, according to a zoning and land use study the county published in December 2023. Other mix-ups around the coding over the last few years also caused confusion for patrons, Seitz said.
Community advocates hoped to change the cemetery’s classification to a cemetery zone, which is how human cemeteries are generally classified, but property owners disagreed. J.K. Morris wanted to keep the property’s “industrial” classification and designation, and was also worried with how a change in zoning would restrict access to cell tower activity, according to letters owners wrote to King County Executive Dow Constantine’s office over the past two years.
“We write with concerns,” Steve and Julie Morris wrote in July 2023. “We respectfully request that the (pet cemetery) not be incorporated into the 2024 Comp Plan update as it moves forward.”
In the end, the county’s Comprehensive Plan team opted to recommend a change to a type of “urban residential” zone, said Jensen, who was also the primary author of last year’s report. This month, the plan and the zoning change were officially approved.
“Our understanding of the community interest was to preserve cemetery use. So that was one of our considerations when looking at the zoning,” Jensen said. The urban residential zoning will “better support the historic nature of the cemetery,” Jensen said.
The change won’t affect cell tower operations.
Past challenges haven’t prevented Seitz from imagining big plans for the cemetery in the future. She envisions it becoming a lively community space where patrons can again cremate and bury their pets, as well as hold regular memorial events. She also wants to register the site on the National Register of Historic Places, which it’s eligible for.
“It would be the second pet cemetery in the U.S. and first in the west” to be recognized, she said. “We could have a new heyday for this place.”
“Not a place of rest”
Henley loved the spotlight.
The 3-year-old Frenchie, fond of chasing balls and posing for costume-filled Instagram shoots, was born with lots of spirit. That didn’t change after he and his family – Guo, his wife and Wiley, their older Frenchie and Henley’s best friend – moved from New York to Seattle in 2021.
It didn’t change even after Henley got sick, or after he started using a wheelchair and learned how to move differently. He still bounded after Wiley, Guo said.
After Henley died, the family, who lives in Seattle, was looking forward to coming by the cemetery whenever they missed him. But for the past two years, no one has answered the cemetery’s main phone line and its voicemail box is always full, Guo said. Calls and emails to the owners go unanswered.
“I’m so glad we laid him down,” Guo said. “But every time I think about coming to visit him, I just think about how his marker’s not there.”
He isn’t interested in taking any sort of legal action against the cemetery at this point. It would probably add even more work and expenses, he said. At the same time, his frustrations with the standstill have grown.
Burying his beloved Henley was “supposed to bring peace of mind,” Guo said. “I’m not trying to fight for my money back. The only thing I want is for my marker to be here.”
Another cemetery patron, Randi Shartin, wishes existing gravestones would receive basic maintenance.
On one recent afternoon, Shartin spent hours helping other community members who took it upon themselves to clean memorial markers, clip grass and mark graves. She buried her 9-year-old cocker spaniel, Scampi, at the cemetery in 1987.
“It’s a formality,” she said. “But it seemed like the right thing to do.”
She doesn’t visit often, but she knows exactly where Scampi is: Plot 9, Row K. When she does come by, she finds the grass has grown so long she can’t find his headstone.
Meanwhile, preservation concerns continue. Late last month, King County took steps to permit the removal and demolition of parts of the cemetery, like the parking lot and an access road patrons use – which aren’t included in the historic landmark designation.
“It’s not a place of rest anymore,” said Guthrie, of Lacey. “There’s too much turmoil.”