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How the current site of Gig Harbor High School nearly became a cemetery

Posted on March 27th, 2025 By: Ted Kenney

Sixty years ago, Gig Harbor residents fought an anti-development battle against Mountain View Funeral Home & Cemetery that altered the city’s landscape as we know it today.

The dustup centered on whether Mountain View, based in Lakewood, should be allowed to operate a cemetery near Gig Harbor. The company owned some 100 acres just outside the city limits, west of Highway 16 and north of Rosedale Street (or, as some newspapers called it back then, the Carr Inlet-Gig Harbor Road).

The dispute’s outcome ensured that drivers cruising on the freeway today, a little north of Rosedale Street, see only one memorial park, to the east (Haven of Rest), but not a second cemetery, twice as large, on their west side.

It also meant that a portion of Mountain View’s property near Highway 16 would go on to become the site of Gig Harbor High School and Discovery Elementary School, rather than a sober funeral home and a burial ground with close-cropped lawns and well-tended graves.

A separate 39 acres of Mountain View’s original holdings, west of the high school, has remained undeveloped up to the present day. It is now the proposed site of a 31-house subdivision.

80-acres cemetery proposed

In 1964, the peninsula’s population was growing. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge would soon go toll-free. Just across the highway from Mountain View’s land, Haven of Rest funeral home and memorial park was getting established under the new ownership of Richard and Ruth Berg.

That summer, Mountain View applied to Pierce County to create an 80-acre cemetery on its Gig Harbor-adjacent property.

The city, as well as neighbors, reacted as if they’d seen a corpse. They pushed back forcefully.

At least one Gig Harborite living today was in the thick of the dispute. Jake Bujacich, now 98, was a town council member at the time and later served as the town’s mayor and a county commissioner. He remembers the controversy well.

People in town didn’t think the area needed a duplicate cemetery, with Haven of Rest already open along the highway, he recalled.

Also, Bujacich said, people saw Highway 16 as a boundary between commercial uses on the east side and rural and residential land on the west. Folks on the west side objected to Mountain View going in. “They didn’t want a cemetery in their backyards,” he said.

Gig Harbor High School. Photo by Vince Dice

Proposal rejected twice

That fall, Gig Harbor residents turned up in the chambers of the county planning commission to speak against Mountain View’s permit request.

“Gig Harbor city officials objected stating this would interfere with their future plans for annexation,” the Tacoma News Tribune reported.

“Other residents, including a man [who] would have had his property surrounded by the cemetery, objected, asking that their neighbors perhaps be a bit more lively,” the newspaper said.

Planning commissioners turned down Mountain View’s application. The cemetery owner petitioned to a higher level of government but in February 1965, the county commission rejected that permit request.

Meanwhile, the city of Gig Harbor hatched plans that would give it some control over nearby lands, including Mountain View’s. At a standing-room-only special meeting in early May, the town council unanimously approved annexing an area that included Mountain View’s proposed cemetery.

However, before Gig Harbor could complete the annexation, Mountain View went back before county commissioners with a pared-down plan. This time it sought permission for a cemetery on just 38 acres.

Objectors from Gig Harbor went before Judge Robert A. Jacques, seeking a restraining order blocking the county from acting on Mountain View’s request while the city proceeded with annexation. The judge declined, “stating he could not restrain the board of county commissioners from doing a legal act — holding a hearing,” a newspaper report said.

County ultimately OK’d the proposal

By this time, some in Gig Harbor were questioning the fairness of blocking a commercial enterprise to stave off competition against an already-established one (in this case, Haven of Rest). One attendee of a key county commission meeting on May 26 asked whether, in the future, the city might annex an area in order to “cut out a gas station from opposition to another gas station,” the News Tribune reported.

But when commissioners at that meeting approved Mountain View’s permit request, plenty of people in Gig Harbor cried out loudly.

“It appears even though with all this disapproval the commissioners again, with their authority, chose to overlook the voice of the people directly affected,” the Peninsula Gateway editorialized.

“It is obvious that the County Commissioners, who were elected by your vote, have neglected to act in the best interests of this area.”

Then why do Gig Harbor High, Discovery Elementary and their surrounding ballfields, parking lots and playgrounds now occupy the land that was supposed to become a memorial park?

Company backed off

According to Bujacich, opposition to Mountain View’s proposed cemetery in Gig Harbor had been so fierce that the company abandoned its plan.

“They got so much flak that [Mountain View owner Brewer] Thompson just backed out,” he said.

By 1977, the Peninsula School District wanted land for a new high school, and Mountain View sold them almost 60 acres. Gig Harbor High and Discovery Elementary now occupy that property.