Willie Keil’s Grave State Park Heritage Site – state parks quest #37

It is an unassuming gravel pullout on a smooth stretch of Highway 6 about five miles east of  Raymond. At one end, three interpretive signs are embedded in concrete. At the other, a stone marker squats in the grass. A small hill rises just beyond, topped with a couple of big trees and — look closely — a wire fence. This is Willie Keil’s Grave State Park Heritage Site. Perhaps you’ve pulled over out of curiosity. Who was Willie Keil, and why is his grave a historic site?

Myth and reality 

The signs explain that Willie, the eldest son of a religious revivalist, came over the Oregon Trail in a whiskey-filled coffin, becoming the only known dead person to have crossed the entire trail.

The story goes like this. Willie’s father, Wilhelm Keil, wanted to move to the Oregon Country to escape what he perceived as the pressure of civilization on his religious community in northeast Missouri, the Bethel Colony. A scouting party picked a site on the Willapa River as well-suited for a new utopian settlement. Eldest son Willie was so enthusiastic about the new settlement that he begged his father to be allowed to lead the emigrant train across the Oregon Trail. Tragically, Willie died of malaria a few days before the group was to depart. His father, determined to keep his promise, sealed Willie’s body in a lead-lined coffin filled with whiskey, placed the coffin on the front wagon, and set out in May 1855. Along the route, the sight of the coffin awed native peoples, who respectfully allowed safe passage. Upon arrival at the Willapa six months later, the party buried Willie, singing German hymns over his grave.

Some of that is documented in Wilhelm’s journals, and some has been added by subsequent storytellers, giving rise to the romantic myth of the “pickled pioneer” whose fervor led his father to fulfill Willie’s dying wish of leading a wagon train to the promised land of the Northwest. The interpretive signs at the pullout balance fact and legend, omitting embellished fictions, such as Native Americans’ response to the coffin and Willie’s deathbed plea to lead the wagon train, and retaining established facts, such as embalming the corpse in whiskey made by the Bethel colonists.

A bigger history

While Willie’s posthumous journey certainly captures the imagination — the dedication of overland emigrants, a heartbroken father’s pure devotion to his son, the tragedy of a life cut short — perhaps the greater significance is that the gravesite marks the location of the first attempted utopian colony in the Pacific Northwest, an effort that set the stage for more than a century of utopian experiments in this far corner of the country.

Roots of a utopian vision

Willie’s father, Wilhelm Keil, emigrated to the United States from Prussia in the 1830s. He arrived at the height of the Second Great Awakening, a period of response to rapid political and economic changes in the young United States. As the country expanded westward across the continent, some people looked to religion to explain their changing world. They rejected Enlightenment thinking, which emphasized rationality, scientific inquiry, and a God that did not interfere with the natural laws of the universe. Instead, religious revivalists argued for a personal relationship with God. Only by converting in front of witnesses could the individual find salvation.

Across New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, tent revivals brought hundreds of people together. Buoyed by the energy and zeal of the charismatic leaders, almost always men, who embodied the idea of Jesus as a friend and father figure, tens of thousands converted. Many religions originated during the Second Great Awakening, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), the Seventh-Day Adventists, African Methodist Episcopalians (AME), and African Methodist Episcopal Zionists (AME Zion). It was into this religious ferment that Keil alighted when he moved to Pittsburgh in 1837.

He met former members of the Harmony Society, founded by George Rapp, a German who had emigrated after being persecuted in his home country for promoting separatism from the Lutheran faith. In 1804, Rapp launched Harmony and Economy, settlements near Pittsburgh, and, ten years later, a colony in Indiana. The Society believed in communally held property and purification of the self in anticipation of Christ’s return, expressed by hard work and celibacy. The settlements, which focused on agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation, were successful into the late 19th century. In 1832, about a third of the Harmonists split off, in part over disagreements about celibacy, and tried to found a new society near Pittsburgh.

Keil’s Christianity

By 1838, Keil had become a Methodist preacher, but grew dissatisfied with organized religion. Inspired by the revivals happening throughout western Pennsylvania and encouraged by some of the disaffected Harmonists, he launched a new group founded on Golden Rule principles of selflessness and mutual generosity. In 1844, fearing what he viewed as the unhealthy influence of an immoral world, he and about 500 followers established the Bethel Colony in northeastern Missouri. Colonists manufactured cloth and leather goods, furniture, musical and agricultural equipment, food products, and alcohol. All earnings went into one account, and colonists received allotments of food and supplies from a central warehouse. 

The Bethel Colony was successful enough that Keil founded another colony, Nineveh, about 45 miles northwest, but he fretted about the westward creep of corrupt civilization. In 1853, nine Bethel colonists headed west to scout a location for a new colony. They selected the lush, green Willapa River valley. The area’s agricultural potential appeared excellent, merchantable timber crowded the hills, and nearby Willapa Bay promised plenty of shellfish and a transportation corridor to the Pacific Coast. Keil liked what the returning scouts told him when some returned to Bethel in 1854 (others stayed to start building a settlement), and preparations began for between 80 and 250 colonists (accounts differ) to cross the Oregon Trail the next year.

West to Oregon Country

In May 1855, the emigrants were ready to leave. Keil’s eldest son, 19-year-old Willie, had asked to come to the new colony and his father had consented. However, five days before departure, on May 19, Willie died of malaria. Whether out of a sense of duty to keep his promise, overwhelming grief at the loss of his child, his religious convictions, or some combination of the three, Keil determined to take Willie’s body to Oregon.

He bought a metal coffin (accounts say it was either lead-lined or made of iron), placed his son’s corpse inside, and filled it with Golden Rule whiskey made by the colony. The casket was sealed and placed on the lead wagon, transforming the wagon train into a funeral procession.

Wilhelm Keil’s journals recount idyllic tales of friendly encounters with natives. He claimed, dubiously, they were awed by his conspicuous faith and his ability to understand their languages and customs. In any event, the party made the six-month journey unscathed.

Burial at last

When the colonists arrived at the Willapa site in November 1855, Keil took a look around and decided it was too wet, too forested, and too remote for his hardy pioneers, and determined to try farther south. He really didn’t like the area, writing, “Our clothes and shoes actually rot on our bodies because of the mud and wetness. We are imprisoned worse than prisoners in jail.”

On the 26th of November or December, depending on the source, the group buried Willie atop a hill, singing German hymns to mark the somber occasion. Given that Wilhelm Keil had apparently already decided that this was not, in fact, the place for his new colony, it’s curious that he interred Willie here. He’d already traveled more than 2000 miles and six months. Why not wait to bury his son in the permanent settlement? History is murky on this point.

Some emigrants, including several members of the Giesy family, stayed in the Willapa Valley. Willie’s grave became the focal point of the Giesy family cemetery, which houses the remains of those who stayed put and of their descendants. Standing in the roadside pullout and looking up the hill, the fence you see surrounds the Giesy cemetery. The stone marker at the west end of the pullout memorializes the valley’s first post office, school, and fort, built by those early settlers.

Utopianism, Northwest style

Wilhelm Keil’s utopian vision was a perfect society in which everyone had social and economic equality and acted in the group’s interest. Historian Charles LeWarne wrote that for utopianists, “It was an article of faith that some functions could not be performed alone as effectively as they could through union of similarly minded persons.” In keeping with the Second Great Awakening’s elevation of charismatic religious leaders, Keil was the glue that held his group together.

Utopianists believed in a society based on imagined ancient cultures where people lived in harmony with nature and had few material needs. By living simply and working for the common good, members were closer to their God. The best way to accomplish this was to live intentionally in communal settings, such as the Bethel Colony. Other notable utopian communes of the era include Rapp’s Harmony Society, the Oneida Community in upstate New York, and the Amana Colonies in Iowa. For Wilhelm Keil, as for many other emigrants, moving to the Pacific Northwest, which he deemed a “Second Eden,” offered the opportunity to start afresh in creating his ideal community.

A fresh start in Oregon

Dissatisfied with the Willapa, Keil bought a land claim with a working mill on the Pudding River, a 62-mile-long squiggle through part of the fertile Willamette Valley, an agricultural paradise that had been attracting overland migrants for more than a decade by the time Keil got there in 1856 or 1857. Historically a tributary of the Willamette River, shifting flood plains have made the contemporary Pudding a tributary of the Molalla, which flows into the Willamette.

Keil named the new colony for one of his daughters, Aurora, and the colonists set to work. They struggled for the first several years, losing a number of members (including four of Keil’s children) to a smallpox epidemic in 1862. The following year, more emigrants from Bethel Colony arrived and the colony stabilized, with 600 residents at its peak.

Aurora had a school, church, hotel, mill, several businesses, and a highly regarded band that entertained audiences up and down the West Coast. The arrival in 1870 of the California & Oregon Railroad, for which Keil had lobbied successfully, cemented the colony’s importance in the development of the Willamette Valley. 

Keil’s leadership

Wilhelm Keil’s desire for isolation from the corrupting influence of civilization evolved into a transactional view of how the Aurora Colony could benefit by fulfilling an economic role in the Willamette Valley. As at the Bethel Colony, members sold agricultural products, made furniture and other handcrafted goods to sell, and tended a large orchard. Keil clearly understood the benefits of a capitalist relationship with other communities in the region, and the Aurora Colony prospered.

Despite his Golden Rule doctrine and emphasis on equally shared resources, Keil was nonetheless the leader of the Bethel and Aurora colonies, and his word was law. He never returned to Missouri, running the Bethel Colony entirely via letters from Oregon. In Aurora, his family lived in a colony-built mansion, Das Große Haus, in contrast to the simple log cabins and frame houses of other colonists. He was sometimes referred to as King Keil, an incisive observation on his leadership, and one that reflected the magnetic style typical of religious leaders.

Death and dissolution

By 1877, the Aurora Colony owned some 8,000 acres. On December 30 that year, Keil died unexpectedly at 65. Other than starting to transfer some property to individual members in the mid-1870s, he had made little provision for the colony’s continuation after his death. By 1883, the Aurora Colony had been dissolved, with property going to various members. Back in Missouri, the Bethel Colony also dissolved by 1881. 

Today, Aurora lives on as a National Historic District, featuring a museum, archives and library, exhibits, and opportunities for tours of the five-building complex. The colony also lives on in literature, having inspired a number of books, including a trilogy of novels and a nonfiction work by Jane Kirkpatrick.

Legacy of utopian communitarianism

Although he rejected the Willapa site, Wilhelm Keil’s utopian colony in the Pacific Northwest was the first of many similar settlements, both religious and secular. At the turn of the 20th century, utopian communities around Puget Sound briefly flourished, fed in part by labor-fueled radicalism, as workers in maritime and forest industries pushed for fair working conditions. More recently, a number of communities dedicated to intentional living have been founded across the region, including several not far from Aurora. Since Aurora’s founding in 1856, Oregon has had about 300 utopian settlements and Washington about 130.  

Wilhelm Keil was motivated by the Second Great Awakening’s religious fervor. Later utopianists were inspired by economic conditions or social upheaval. Whether founded on religious or socialist principles, these communities share certain characteristics that inform their goal of creating an ideal society. Economic cooperation in the production and distribution of goods and services, land held in common, political equality, and activity for the benefit of all are central tenets. Founded on ideas of equality, shared work, and common good, these communities have evolved. From back-to-the-landers in the 1960s and 1970s to senior housing, co-housing, and eco-villages today, the impulse to seek a simpler, fairer way of living remains relevant and timely. 

Willie Keil never saw his father’s utopian ideals flower in the Pacific Northwest. But his grave is a tangible reminder of the power of communitarian thinking and cooperative effort. Standing in the hilltop cemetery looking out over the verdant Willapa valley, Willie’s hard-won resting place is also a reminder of the sense of possibility and wonder that continues to draw people to the Pacific Northwest.

Postscript: a significant sign

Several years ago, State Parks removed the original wooden highway historic sign that marked Willie Keil’s grave. Installed in 1959 as part of a statewide beautification effort related to the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, it was deteriorating after decades standing in wet Willapa weather. The upper portion of the sign is a magnificent, detailed wood carving depicting the Keil wagon train, with Willie’s coffin in the lead wagon.

Thanks to current and former state parks interpretive staff, I learned that the carving was done by noted Seattle artist Ernest Norling. He painted murals during the New Deal, including those in the post offices in Bremerton and Prosser. Several of his paintings are in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. Norling carved a few highway markers for Washington State, likely including the one still standing at Alpowa Summit in the southeastern region.

Today, the Northwest Carriage Museum, five miles west in Raymond, houses the original sign, now fully restored, and it’s well worth a visit to see it.

Fast facts about Willie Keil’s Grave State Park Heritage Site

• .34-acre, day-use park, open year-round
• parking
• interpretive signs
• Don’t forget your Discover Pass, $10 daily or, for a very reasonable $30, purchase an annual pass