Some trees will be cleared, expanding the quiet grounds by nearly three acres.

The Port Blakely Cemetery is about to expand, but unlike other projects requiring city approval, this one won’t disturb the present residents or block anyone’s views.

The three-acre cemetery off Old Mill Road is the final resting place for some 1,300 souls. With the clearing of an additional 2.7 acres purchased from IslandWood two years ago, the non-profit board that manages the cemetery will have space to double the number of plots in decades to come.

“We have tried to leave things here the way God and nature intended,” said Andrew Price, an island historian and cemetery board member, as he walked the grounds on a recent shimmering, sunny day. With new acreage, he said, “there may be enough space here now to last 125 years.”

Ringed by stands of tall firs – some of them diseased and slated for removal, to be replaced by cedars and other native species – the historic cemetery eschews the highly groomed lawns and symmetry of churchyards elsewhere.

The ground undulates over buried coffins, while many of the old tombstones, some dating back to the 1880s, have sunk and tilted into the earth, if they exist at all. Between 300 and 500 graves at the cemetery have no markers, by Price’s estimate.

He knows the landscape well. When the time comes, Price and his wife Marianna plan be buried there, joining son Andrew, who died of cancer three years ago.

“It’s a beautiful spot, and the trees are big and old,” Pride said of the cemetery, founded by the Port Blakely Mill a century ago.

In a 100-year-old picture that Price has seen, a giant fir now in the center of the grounds was “just a spindly little thing,” newly planted.

A treasure trove of island history, the graveyard is occupied by many historic figures and regular folk whose lives Price documented in his book, “Port Blakely: The Community that Captain Renton Built.”

There is the gravesite of Dr. Cecil Kellam, who served Port Blakely’s mill and shipyard workers and their families for 40 years, delivering many of the babies during the mill community heydey.

To learn more about the good doctor, Price in the 1970s called a Kellam residence in Seattle to see if they were related – and the woman who answered hung up on him.

Ten years later, the woman called back and apologized, saying that when Price called before, her husband – the doctor’s son – was dying.

She had some of the doctor’s things, and wondered if Price was interested in seeing them. He rushed right over.

The woman produced a folding screen, which was used in the doctor’s examining room, and photographs taken by the doctor’s wife, Jessie.

There too, was Dr. Kellam’s black satchel, which had not been opened in some 50 years.

“When we opened it, it smelled like medicine, and it still contained medicine vials and his implements,” Price said, noting that the items are now on display at the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum.

Strolling the property, Price pointed to the monuments of Europeans and Asians who settled on the island.

There was the grave of Swedish ropemaker Nils Elofson and his wife Fausta, who sold milk from their farm on Toe Jam Hill. When Seattle burned to the ground in 1889, they watched from their hilltop home.

The Petersons, who homesteaded Sunny Hill Dairy Farm, are laid to rest nearby. There is also a tombstone of Capt. August Mattson, who sailed from New York to Port Blakely on the ship Harvest Home.

Some of the island’s Japanese residents have plots at the cemetery, including grocers Tomegoro and Tamao Takayoshi, who also operated a photography studio, watch repair shop and laundry in the Japanese section of town known as Yama, which means “mountain.”

The oldest graves on the property are in the center of the cemetery and toward the back and to the west, where some tombstones are hidden in the woods.

Since the Port Blakely Mill didn’t open the cemetery until 1900, Price and other historians believe some of the headstones from the 1880s were moved to the site from elsewhere.

Near the entrance of the cemetery is a tall monument to the six who died during the sinking of the steamer “Dix” in 1906.

Many of the graves are distinctively decorated with little lambs, for children, or with logs, noting that the deceased was a member of the Woodmen of the World, one of several fraternal orders that helped maintain the gravesites over the years.

In 1946, the mill decided to turn the graveyard over to the community, and it has been run by a volunteer board ever since. They meet once a year, and send an annual letter to the 400 descendants of people buried there, requesting a $20 maintenance fee.

It’s an admittedly low-key, low-maintenance place. But that seems fitting, Price said, for an old cemetery out in the woods.

“Each monument in it seems to speak out, to tell a story,” Price wrote in his book.

Now, as the cemetery expands, he said, “Our goal is to have it look the same, with its ups and downs and lots of healthy trees.”