Tot Taggart Pringle

Tot Taggart Pringle

1886 - 19??

on gravestone with Arthur M Pringle

Section 1

Tot Pringle buried in the right place

The Bend woman was buried in the wrong spot 30 years ago

By Kate Ramsayer / The Bulletin

Published: September 16. 2010 4:00AM PST

 

Three decades ago, Tot Taggart Pringle was buried in the wrong place.

With apparently no family in the area to catch the mistake, her cremated remains were interred alongside Charles C. Pringle in Bend's Pilot Butte Cemetery — instead of beside her husband, Arthur Pringle, and their young son in the Greenwood Cemetery just a stone's throw away.

But Wednesday morning, after months of digging through photos and journals and delving into the mystery of what happened to the woman who lived in Bend a century ago, volunteers and staff with the Deschutes County Historical Society helped return Tot Pringle to where she belonged.

“And they're together,” said Vanessa Ivey, a volunteer at the society's museum, as she shoveled dirt over the identical bronze urns containing Tot and Arthur Pringle's remains.

The puzzles that drew in the historical society started in the spring, when Ivey, a new volunteer, was given the task of sorting through some of Tot Pringle's photo albums and journals, which had been donated to the historical society.

Reading the journals, written when Pringle was older but recalling her time in Bend a century ago, Ivey was able to piece together parts of the Pringles' lives.

“Little by little,” Ivey said, “you're trying to flesh out who this person is.”

Getting to know her

Tot Pringle was born in 1886 in Wisconsin and moved with her parents to Portland in 1904.

“She was an adventurous soul,” Ivey said.

In her early 20s, Pringle won a trip to California through a magazine contest, and traveled all around Yosemite and other parts of the state, Ivey said. She moved to Bend in 1910 to work at First National Bank, and a year later married Arthur Pringle, who came to Bend through his work on the Oregon Trunk railway line.

Photos show the two hunting, fishing, picknicking along the Metolius River and enjoying the outdoors, often with friends — Pringle seemed to love being with other people, Ivey said. They went to parties with the Drakes and the Brooks and other prominent Bend families of the time, she said, and were a part of the business community.

In 1916, the Pringles had a son, John, and photos show him at parties, dressed up with a drum and American flag for the Fourth of July and more. John died, however, just before his ninth birthday from complications related to strep throat.

“From the time he was born through the time he died, there are nonstop photos that document everything he did,” Ivey said. “He was so loved. ... After he dies, there's a period of five or six years, there's nothing.”

'Something's not right' 

The Pringles eventually moved back to Portland, but when Arthur Pringle died in 1956 he was buried next to his son in Bend.

However, Ivey couldn't track down a date of death for Tot Pringle.

She looked in the records for the Pilot Butte Cemetery, and found that a Tot Pringle had been buried there in 1972. But the records also listed her birth year as 1972, so Ivey assumed it was an infant with the same name.

But then she found a photo of Arthur Pringle's tombstone, which also included Tot's name and birth year, but with an empty space for the year of her death.

“I thought, that's really odd, because when she was interred there would have been her death date,” Ivey said. “We all had a feeling — something's not right.”

Once Ivey found Tot's death certificate, dated Jan. 3, 1972, she realized that the Tot Pringle of the pictures and journals was, in fact, the Tot Pringle buried with Charles Pringle. And although Charles was related to the pioneering Pringles of Pringle Falls, he was not related to Tot or to Arthur Pringle, who was from Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia.

Mistaken identity

Something was definitely amiss, said Kelly Cannon-Miller, executive director of the historical society.

“When she died in 1972, she was it, there was no family left,” Cannon-Miller said. “We figured she was accidentally buried with the other Pringle family.”

Cannon-Miller called Niswonger-Reynolds Funeral Home, which owns Greenwood Cemetery, to explain the story late last week, said Dana Makepeace with the funeral home. And Makepeace started checking out records. While there were entries that showed Arthur and John Pringle were buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Tot Pringle didn't appear. She was, however, listed in the Charles Pringle plot at Pilot Butte Cemetery.

So Makepeace called the historical society to say the funeral home would make it right.

Making it right

Wednesday, she dug up an urn buried above Charles Pringle's coffin, which matched the single one buried in Arthur Pringle's plot.

With people from the historical society gathered around, Makepeace placed the two urns side-by-side in the ground, and Ivey packed dirt around them.

But Ivey is still working to uncover more about Tot Pringle, such as whether she was a suffragist. Although there's no evidence yet, after reading Pringle's words and looking at her pictures for months, Ivey said it seems like women's voting rights would have been a passion for Pringle.

“You don't want the story to end, and the story doesn't end with her being reinterred in the appropriate spot — that's just the end of one chapter,” Ivey said. “I just want to find out more about her. I feel like we've got the tip of the iceberg, and there's so much more.”

From the Bend Bulletin