Little is known about K. Kawanishi. Sketchy records from the turn of the century indicate that he immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1900 in his early 20s. He lived in a boarding house in Thompson Springs, Utah, while working for the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad Company. He was married and, sometime between 1900 and 1905, he died and was buried in a lonely place in northern Grand County, the site still marked by a beautifully carved marble tombstone with his name inscribed under a decorative flower and above the words “Native of Japan.”
Cemeteries Program Manager for the Utah Division of State History Amy Barry learned that much from context and research into historic census records. It’s not known how Kawanishi died, or why he was buried in that spot.
“The only thing I will say about how Kawanishi is situated is that he’s facing the train,” Barry said. She has spent significant time at the site in recent weeks, working to properly record it and repair the damaged headstone.
The Bureau of Land Management first took note of the tombstone in 1993, when it was observed during documentation of an old narrow-gauge railroad that was later abandoned in favor of a standard-width line. For years the tombstone lay cracked in three pieces. Over the past several weeks, Barry cleaned and restored the broken pieces in her lab in the Salt Lake City area. This week, officials from the Moab BLM office, Tara Beresh, the curatorial and collections manager for the Moab Museum, Edith Mitko, who has served as the state director of Asian Affairs, and several others joined Barry as she brought the pieces back to the site and mortared them together in place. The group hiked across desert scrub to reach the spot and watched as Barry removed clamps holding the pieces in place and mixed mortar to fill cracks in the marble.
To read more about the headstone of K. Kawanishi and the efforts to restore it, visit Moab Sun News.
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aim to inform readers across the state.