Lost Cemeteries of Early L.A.: The Forgotten Burial Sites of the City's Earliest Settlers
The inevitable has awaited every Angeleno since the founding of the Pueblo in 1781.
In their grief, family and friends prepared a final resting place for those who had died. The resting place might be the local equivalent of Boot Hill or a quiet hillside overlooking the Sonoratown barrio. This being Los Angeles, there was nothing final about it, however.
The dead of Los Angeles have been as restless as the living.
And when cemeteries moved, many permanent Angelenos — often the poorest and most marginalized — were left behind and forgotten.
1. San Gabriel Campo Santo
The first El Pueblo de Los Angeles settler to die was Maria Josefa Rosas on May 11, 1784. She was only eight, the youngest of the six children of Josef (or José) Rosas and Maria Manuela Hernandez. They were in the original group of pobladores that Spanish authorities had settled on land taken from the Kizh/Tongva community of Yaangna.
Maria Josefa was buried in the Campo Santo (consecrated ground) of the San Gabriel mission (founded 1771), 10 miles from Los Angeles over a well travelled Indigenous trade route from the San Gabriel Valley to Yaangna.
Maria Josefa would be joined by more Angelenos in the following decades, since Los Angeles had no permanent church or burial ground before 1822. Buried among the Angelenos at San Gabriel are an estimated 6,000 Mission Indians for whom baptism, death and burial often followed within days.
2. Los Angeles Campo Santo
The rituals of Catholic life typically require a church, but the Spanish settlers were slow to find the money and expertise to build one. There also was some reluctance on the part of the mission padres to staff one. Franciscan missionary Francisco Fermín Lasuén in 1787 complained to the colonial authorities that Angelenos were "an immense hindrance to the conversion of the pagans, for they give them bad example, they scandalize them, and they actually persuade them not to become Christians, lest they themselves suffer the loss of free labor."
Work on a church began and stalled and picked up again from 1814 through 1822. Even before the building was completed, mourners were burying their dead in a plot at the north side of the church entrance. When that modest space filled, new burials were begun in a field on the south side. This became the Campo Santo of Los Angeles, which received at least 600 burials between 1820 and 1844.
Most were the Kizh/Tongva of Yaangna whose labor built the church and much of early Los Angeles. Some of the dead were the grandees of the little town. A few were notorious outlaws, victims of vigilante justice.
Burials in the Los Angeles Campo Santo ended by 1846 and the cemetery — not exactly abandoned, not exactly cared for — eventually became county property and much later a parking lot. A commemorative plaque at the site assured curious tourists that the graves had been moved to Calvary Cemetery.
According to historian Steven Hackel, "the assumption that the bones in the old cemetery were moved [was] wishful thinking. … Nothing in the historical record states that any remains were in fact ever moved from the old plaza church cemetery to the new one."
While the site was prepared in 2010 for an addition to the adjacent Mexican American cultural center, contractors uncovered the burials of at least 100 early Angelenos. Their remains were removed, packed up and stored at several county sites. The treatment of these burials was deeply wounding to the Native American community and the descendants of the city's colonial founders.
The remains were eventually reburied in the Campo Santo. Today, the site is a garden behind a low fence. An interpretive placard tells visitors what lies beneath.
3. Old Calvary Cemetery
The Catholic graveyard that replaced the Campo Santo was a mile north of the plaza at the mouth of an arroyo that would one day be called Chavez Ravine. The dead were carried from the plaza church, through the Sonoratown barrio on the street named Eternity, to the new burial ground. Called Calvary Cemetery, it received its first burials in the winter of 1844-45.
Calvary Cemetery would receive perhaps 10,000 more in the following decades. The register of burials includes the names of city builders Boyle, Bell, Stearns, Chapman, Avila, Coronel, Dominguez, Yorba, Bandini and Downey, among others. Indigenous Angelenos were buried in a segregated section of the grounds.
By 1860, Calvary Cemetery was becoming crowded. Burials slowed in the 1880s and apparently stopped in 1896 when the Los Angeles diocese opened a new Calvary Cemetery at the eastern edge of Boyle Heights. Some of those buried in old Calvary were moved to new Calvary, but the dead without heirs remained among the crumbling monuments and vandalized tombs.
A reporter from the Los Angeles Times who walked through the cemetery in 1902 was shocked by the contrast between the forlorn cemetery and the urban life that intruded on it. "Even now, in its most secluded depths, among sunken graves and blackened tombstones, shaded by great pepper trees and overgrown with grass and weeds, the mournful creak of the oil pumps, the clangor of the locomotive, the crash of the electric gong, and the din of the iron foundry is never hushed."
Old Calvary continued to deteriorate until 1925, when the city took charge of removing some of the remaining burials to new Calvary. The site today is the parking lot and sports field of Cathedral High School, whose teams play (appropriately enough) as the Phantoms.
4. Los Angeles City Cemetery
Non-Catholics lacked a burial place in the newly American Los Angeles of 1850. Only in 1853 did a non-sectarian graveyard open on the hill that overlooked the plaza and its church. The site had many names: Fort Hill Cemetery, Fort Moore Cemetery, the Protestant Cemetery, Los Angeles City Cemetery and just "the cemetery on the hill."
According to former LAPL map librarian Glen Creason, the City Cemetery began as "a sort of boot hill for the cowboys and local miners who could not afford a funeral in a mid-19th century (and rather lawless) L.A. … Interestingly, these burial grounds were free from segregation — all races were welcome after death." The first official burial was trapper Andy Sublette, killed in 1853 by a bear in Malibu Canyon.
The City Cemetery was unregulated at first; "squatter's rights" ruled. In 1860, the Los Angeles Star lamented what had become of the cemetery.
And in visiting the city of our dead, the mind is painfully impressed with its lonely, dreary isolation.Los Angeles Star, 1860
"[O]n a barren hill-top, or in the open plain, bodies are interred, with apparently little care whether it remain sacred to that purpose or not. No enclosure marks the ground dedicated to holy object; no barrier keeps off the wandering animals or beasts of prey; the sacred mounts are trodden over and defaced; the tablets which indicate the names of those who sleep beneath are overturned; and in visiting the city of our dead, the mind is painfully impressed with its lonely, dreary isolation."
The city took charge in 1869, hired a caretaker in 1871 and began selling plots. Over time, the cemetery opened sections maintained by the Masons, Odd Fellows and other fraternal associations. The remainder of the cemetery received little attention, even becoming a sort of "lovers' lane" or, as the Los Angeles Times claimed in 1896, "a place of assignation."
In 1879, the city banned new burials (except for plots already sold) and subdivided part of the hill top. By 1890, many of the anonymous burials of the 1850s had been built over. Memoirist Horace Bell complained in 1900 that "the city of Los Angeles sold … a municipal burying ground, without pretending to remove and re-inter elsewhere the bodies resting there."
The Odd Fellows and the Masons relocated their burials to new cemeteries, and what remained of the site was turned over the Los Angeles Board of Education, which relocated more burials to Evergreen, Rosedale and Hollywood cemeteries. Removals continued into the 1940s. Still, when Fort Hill was cut through in 1951 for the Hollywood Freeway, the bones of early settlers tumbled into the excavation.
During the construction of the Ramon C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts in 2006, 80 more burials were foundand re-interred at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery.
5. Home of Peace
Harris Newmark, Solomon Lazard and other Jewish Angelenos founded the Hebrew Benevolent Society in 1854 with the goal of establishing a cemetery. In 1855, the society acquired city land where Lookout Drive becomes Lilac Terrance on the slope of Chavez Ravine.
"It was not very long before the first Jewish child to die in Los Angeles, named Mahler, was buried there," Newmark remembered almost 60 years later. "This cemetery, on land once owned … by José Andrés Sepúlveda … was beautifully located in a recess or little pocket, as it were, among the hills in the northwest section of the city, where the environment of nature was in perfect harmony with the Jewish ideal 'Home of Peace.'" It was the only Jewish cemetery in Southern California.
The Catholic and Jewish cemeteries shared adjacent hillsides until 1896, when old Calvary Cemetery was abandoned and new Calvary opened in east Los Angeles. The Jewish cemetery lingered until 1902, when nearby industrial and residential development shattered whatever peace that remained.
Congregation B'nai B'rith (today's Wilshire Boulevard Temple) transferred 360 burials to the new Home of Peace on Whittier Boulevard in Boyle Heights between 1902 and 1910. In moving, history repeated itself. The Jewish Home of Peace is across the street from the Catholic Calvary Cemetery.
Today, the Los Angeles Fire Department maintains a training facility where part of the Jewish cemetery once stood. A plaque on a concrete tablet was set up just outside the facility's fence in 1968 in remembrance of the cemetery's benefactors. In June 2022, the concrete tablet remained. The commemorative plaque had gone missing.
Epilogue
The first Catholic, Jewish and Protestant cemeteries in Los Angeles were abandoned by 1910. The displaced dead were scattered to other cemeteries. Not all were found and reburied. There are permanent Angelenos — their names unknown — under parking lots, playing fields and city streets for whom this account is a small remembrance for All Souls Day, Nov. 2.
Sources
Hackel, Steven. "Digging up the Remains of Early Los Angeles: The Plaza Church Cemetery," Southern California Quarterly (Spring 2012), University of California Press.
Newmark, Harris. Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1916.
Stern, Norton. The Jews of Los Angeles: Urban Pioneers. Los Angeles: Jewish Historical Society, 1981.
