SUMPTER — A section in Sumpter’s historic cemetery that hasn’t been used for perhaps longer than half a century could be reopened for burials later this year.

Sumpter Mayor Linda Wise said the city council in the town of 200, about 28 miles west of Baker City, hopes to start selling burial plots in the Sumpter Cemetery, originally the Blue Mountain Cemetery, by around the middle of this summer.

“People, as soon as they heard, started calling wanting to buy plots,” Wise said. “To me it’s kind of an exciting thing.”

The cemetery is about half a mile southeast of downtown Sumpter, just north of the intersection of Sumpter Cemetery and Bear Gulch roads.

Although the cemetery covers 10 acres, Wise said the city’s goal is to clean up one-half acre, including removing stumps. That would create space for about 192 plots, she said.

Other plans include building a new road around the cemetery, as well as new walkways within the site.

Both Wise and LeAnne Woolf, a longtime Sumpter resident, said it appears that the only burials in the past several decades were in the cemetery’s Masonic section.

That includes Woolf’s father, Leland Myers, who died in December 2021 at age 83.

According to a brief record of the cemetery compiled in 1975 by Brooks Hawley, longtime Sumpter Valley resident and historian, “there are no known original records or maps for the cemetery. It is proper to suppose that any such was lost in the Sumpter fire of 1917.”

That blaze, in August of that year, destroyed much of the historic town, which was founded in 1862 and was the hub of the region’s hard-rock mining industry, which had its heyday from around 1890 through World War I.

Sumpter’s population peaked in the 1900 U.S. Census, at 2,216, the only census at which there were more than 700 residents.

The population dipped to 613 in 1910, and to 219 in 1920, three years after the devastating fire.

According to Hawley’s summary, there was an older cemetery in Sumpter, near the corner of Auburn and First streets.

Graves were moved to the current cemetery in 1900, and “likely this cemetery was not started much before then,” Hawley wrote.

Sumpter residents worked to rebuild the cemetery fence in 1963, Hawley wrote.

He noted that “even in boom times most funerals were at Baker Cemetery (Mount Hope) instead of here. Without exception, no one now living in the valley has ancestors in this cemetery. Hardly a dozen plots are remembered on Memorial Day.”