Four-legged mowing machines are munching their way through weeds and vegetation at the Chinese Cemetery on the east side of Baker City this month.

“It’s been really great — it’s such a clever way to take care of it without chemicals,” said Cammy Warner, chair of the Baker County Museum Commission.

The cemetery, along Windmill Road east of Interstate 84, is owned by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in Portland.

The Baker County Historical Society began preservation efforts in 1994 of the cemetery, where 46 burials were recorded from 1894 to 1948.

Although most of the remains were exhumed and returned to China long ago, one marked grave remains — Lee Chue, 1882-1938.

In 2022, the historical society transferred care and upkeep of the cemetery to the Baker Heritage Museum. Over the years, the natural vegetation has obscured many of the trails and depressions that marked previous burial sites.

Now the ground is more visible thanks to the goats and their insatiable appetite for weeds, sagebrush and thistles.

“We didn’t know there were so many burial sites,” Warner said.

The goats belong to Ben and JoHanna Brown. The herd of 34 includes grandmas, mothers and daughters.

Ben Brown said goats are a natural way to control vegetation in hard-to-reach places, or protected sites like a cemetery.

“You can’t go in there with equipment — you need another approach,” he said.

The goats will finish their job in 10 days to two weeks. Each evening, the Browns move the panels to another spot so the goats can munch through another section.

“A lot of that is their natural habitat — steep, rocky, sagebrush and short grass,” he said.

They even like thistles.

“The bigger and heartier the thistle, the more they like it,” he said.

The dry vegetation makes good feed, he said, but is “high energy and low protein” so they also provide the goats with a special protein mixture, as well as several troughs of water.

The goats are on lease, and paid for with The Virginia L. Kostol Fund that was established in 2022 for the care and maintenance of the Chinese Cemetery. Kostol died in December 2020 at age 94, and was active in local historical preservation efforts.

Future plans

Museum volunteers are making a plan for the cemetery — extending the fence around the property, outlining graves with stones, building a rock wall similar to those built by Chinese miners in Baker County, and installing more interpretive signs.

“We have lots of plans,” Warner said.

And, although the goats are cleaning up the vegetation, she said much of the natural habitat will remain, such as the sagebrush.

“We’re going to keep it as original as possible,” she said.