Salem Pioneer Cemetery is a cemetery in Salem, Oregon, United States.OverviewSalem Pioneer Cemetery is one of two historic cemeteries located next to each other at the intersection of South Commercial and Hoyt streets. It is just east of City View Cemetery. The earliest burials center around the Methodist missionary pioneer David Leslie. The Methodist Mission was founded by the Reverend Jason Lee in 1834. This was the first mission to the Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. After the end of the mission period, settlers poured into the Willamette Valley to take advantage of the land that was being granted due to the passage of the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, brought to Congress by early pioneer Samuel R. Thurston, Oregon's first delegate.David Leslie became Jason Lee's principal assistant. He was a leader in the movement to organize the provisional government of Oregon, and a lifelong trustee of the Methodists' Oregon Institute, which was charted as Willamette University by the Territorial legislature in 1854.
