Sunnyside Cemetery

The Sunnyside/Valley View Cemetery (commonly known as Sunnyside Cemetery) is located at the south end of Sherman Road, near the town of Coupeville on central Whidbey Island.  It is situated on a hillside overlooking Ebey’s Prairie.  The oldest part of the cemetery was deeded to the county in 1869 by Mary Bozarth for use as a burial ground.  This section contains the Ebey graves and remains unplatted.  In 1891 John C. Kellogg platted an addition called Sunnyside after the name of Jacob Ebey’s farm.  In 1887 A. Win Cook platted an addition he called Valley View.  He deeded the unsold lots to the Masonic lodge who later deeded them over to the county.  A cemetery district was created in 1964 to oversee these burial grounds along with later additions.

We are indebted to the DAR’s Family Records of Washington Pioneers, Volumes 26 (1954), 38 (undated) and 41 (1969), for three listings of Sunnyside burials.  These were found in the Seattle Public Library.  Also of help was a listing in the Bulletin of the Whatcom Genealogical Society of markers read around 1983.  We would also like to thank Roger Sherman and the cemetery board for making available their burial list.  We have combined all of these lists, verified their information, made corrections where needed, and added more recent burials.

In recent years, portions of the cemetery originally set aside for vehicle access have begun to be used for grave locations and are outside of the platted lots.  For this list we have assigned letters of the alphabet (example 12a) to show that a grave is adjacent to (a) or farther from (b, c, etc.) the nearest platted lot.  We believe this system to be easier to use than the additional numbers assigned to them by the cemetery board.