Late last Friday night, vandals tore out the gilded sign of Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Queen Anne Hill, and apparently dragged it a couple blocks where it was found damaged the next morning.
St. Anne School eighth-grade teacher, Pam Sturgeon, noticed the damaged sign the following morning and immediately called the cemetery administration. She had noticed further down the road along West Raye Street torn out planters had been damaged and tossed on a parked car.
"Somebody ripped off some boxwood plants had put them on top of a car," Sturgeon said.
Loretta Edwards, manager at Mount Pleasant said damages to the sign were likely more than $1,000, money she said will be hard to come by.
"The police said there was not much they can do, and this is going to be really hard because we're family owned and we don't have extra money for these sorts of damages," Edwards said.
Upon receiving Sturgeon's call, staff at Mount Pleasant retrieved the sign and put it a storage barn. The goldleaf lettering on the sign was damaged as was one of the posts that held up the sign. Edwards said the sign will not be put back up for a month or more. The sign is made of cedar and was designed in 1955 or 1956 by Walter Burbank, whose sign shop, SignWorks was located in Seattle but is now in Silverdale. Edwards will ask Burbank to repair it.
Over the years, Mount Pleasant has suffered minor damages to tombstones but nothing as overt as the business's sign being torn out and dragged down the street.
"We've had tipped over stones and things now and then," Edwards said, "but not the sign."[[In-content Ad]]
