NOTES:
1870 OR CENSUS - Wm. Johnson, black, age 50, occupation painter, b. North Carolina, is enumerated with E., age 35, b. Missouri, along with Rosa, age 5 months, b. Oregon.
PROBATE - 'File #455'. Intestate. Died 10 Jul 1872. Adm: O. Dickenson, 07 Aug 1872. Heirs: Elizabeth Johnson, widow; Rosetta Johnson, infant child by adoption".
NOTE - Salem Pioneer Cemetery Black Pioneer Omnibus Memorial was dedicated by the Oregon Northwest Pioneers on 1 Feb 2007.
BIOGRAPHICAL information:
A NOTE ON CERTAIN RELATED BLACK PIONEERS INTERRED IN SALEM PIONEER CEMETERY
Elisabeth Walton Potter, August 13, 2014
Perseverance: A History of African Americans in Oregon's Marion and Polk Counties (Salem, Oregon: Oregon Northwest Black Pioneers, 2011).
The above-named commendable research project published in 2011 drew significantly from the Salem Pioneer Cemetery database since the database provided the basis for identifying African American burials in Salem Pioneer Cemetery and, where possible, the location of graves. The database made it possible for the Oregon Northwest Black Pioneers to erect an omnibus commemorative marker to all of the Black pioneers interred in the cemetery, “known or unknown,” that was dedicated with due ceremony in 2007.
By the time Friends of Pioneer Cemetery database information and photographs of headstones were copied and entered into other collections, the original sources appear to have become obscure. The Salem Pioneer Cemetery database is not cited in footnotes, nor is credit given to Friends of Pioneer Cemetery for photos of the following gravemarkers among the book’s illustrations: Rosetta [Bonter] Johnson (p. 33), Stanley Charmon (p. 112), Wilbert Henderson (p.116), J.C. Jackson (p. 117), Mary Parks Bonter and Marion Parks (p. 120), and Nancy Bonter Williams (p. 123). On an acknowledgement page in front matter, however, Friends of Pioneer Cemetery is included in a sizeable list of institutions which lent support to the project.
Through marriage and adoption proceedings, Bonter family connections included such other early African American members of the Salem community as William P. Johnson, Jesse Williams, and Mary Parks Bonter, who was buried alongside her twin brother, Marion Parks. Because the graves and gravemarkers of these related persons are clustered in a section of the southeast grounds, and because the headstone of the consequential figure W.P. Johnson was discovered buried near its base by FOPC’s headstone repair volunteers very recently, this note, based on the database and Perseverance, was prepared to highlight the relationships.
This is the W.P. Johnson who, with his wife Elizabeth, adopted the child of Jackson and Mary Parks Bonter in January, 1872. The child died, according to her epitaph, on Dec. 23, 1880. Her mother had died of tuberculosis on February 28, 1870, when Rosetta was only five months old. Her father, “Jack,” consented to the adoption by affidavit in Marion County Court proceedings.
William P. Johnson hailed from North Carolina. A painter by trade, he was one of a small number of African American men who, upon finding their children barred from Salem’s public Central School, organized in 1867 the “colored school” which a year later occupied Little Central School, an auxiliary building which stood near the Central School. Johnson was the school’s founding director. (Perseverance, 18-20, 34). W. P. Johnson died scarcely six months after the adoption of Rosetta Johnson. His wife, Elizabeth, continued as adoptive parent of the child. She had the means to provide for a tall marble tablet for her husband’s grave and, eight years or so later, she erected a finely-made compound monument made up of marble obelisk, pedestal, plinth and base block for her adopted daughter’s grave.
GRAVE MARKER - William P. Johnson (Dec. 31, 1820 - July 10, 1872) - 2NW from NW corner 363; headstone repair was completed by contractor, May 2016. Seven broken pieces missing from the marble tablet were found by Firends of Pioneer Cemetery volunteers in probing beneath the turf around the intact base and lower die in 2014. The peices were reconsolidated and attached to complete the repair.
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