History Buffs Rally to Save Pioneers’ Final Resting Place

There’s no resting in peace for Paula Hinkel, nor, she worries, for a cemetery she loves.

She is among the history buffs and amateur genealogists who revere cemeteries. They like the tranquillity, the connection to the past, the beauty, the thrill of hunting for pioneer families and the gratification of finding lost graves.

Savannah Memorial Park in Rosemead is one of the oldest surviving Protestant graveyards in Southern California. To enter is to touch an earlier era. The iron entry gate and narrow, twisting road were built to accommodate buggies. Pioneers rest here, including a signer of the state Constitution.

But, more than 150 years after the cemetery was created, financial problems threaten its survival. With just 4 acres and most of its 3,000 plots filled, little money comes in for upkeep.

Its plight motivated Hinkel, among others.

“I’m a grave photographer by hobby,” she said in a recent interview. “When I heard Savannah was being threatened two years ago because of a financial crisis, I started photographing headstones, then researched their names. The more I learned, the more I became attached to this cemetery and the pioneers buried there.”

Hinkel, 52, was born in Iowa and lives in Toluca Lake. She is a member of the El Monte Historical Society and Friends of Savannah Cemetery and is vice president of the Southern California Genealogical Society.

She and Sue Silver, state coordinator of a volunteer group called California Saving Graves, have compiled a comprehensive website about the cemetery, with photos and biographies of the people buried there.

That website helped link nearly 100 people whose ancestors are buried there -- and who hold the key to its survival.

History experts say the graveyard is even older than its often-broken headstones would attest: It is believed to have been an Indian burial ground.

Pioneers began to use it before the Civil War. About 40 families pushed west on the Santa Fe Trail during the Gold Rush, settling in the lush valley fed by the Rio Hondo. There, they founded the town of Lexington -- a spongy bog later called El Monte.

Within the town, on slightly higher ground, rose the community of Savannah, now known as Rosemead. Unmarked graves already were on the elevated land, which became the local Boot Hill. Non-Catholic pioneers buried loved ones there beginning in the 1840s because they couldn’t be buried at San Gabriel Mission.

No one can find the deed to the property; the earliest graves are unmarked, and some headstones are gone. But M.A. Rogers, a boy of 9, is the first entry in an original burial book that is in the collection of the El Monte Historical Society Museum. The date of his burial was July 22, 1853. No records were kept before then.

“In the early days, when the headstones were made of wood, some boys were hired to clean up the cemetery,” Donna Crippen, curator of the museum, said in a recent interview. “They decided it would be easier to burn the weeds and grass off the graves. Many of the markers burned too, and some were never replaced.”

Among those who rest there are Asa Ellis, a signer of the state Constitution and a California state legislator in the 1860s and 1870s, and Jay Clifton Brearley, a descendant of David Brearley, who signed the U.S. Constitution.

Other local pioneers there include the Cleminsons, Gidleys, Durfees, Maxsons and Shirpsers, for whom elementary schools are named; the Freers, Cogswells, Tylers and Guesses, for whom streets are named; and members of El Monte’s first pioneer family, headed by Ira W. Thompson, the town’s first postmaster, who also built the first hotel and bar.

Violence was no stranger. Three King brothers, all lawmen, reigned in the 1850s and ‘60s during the rowdy “Monte Boys” days. They belonged to the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret order of Southern sympathizers who owned property in and around town and were known for their vigilante justice.

In 1865, at a wedding in Los Angeles, wealthy rancher and alleged murderer Robert Carlisle slashed the hand of Undersheriff Andrew King over a land dispute.

The next day, King’s brothers, Sam and Frank, ambushed Carlisle in the street. They shot him four times, but he managed to return fire. Carlisle and Frank King died; Sam King was wounded but recovered. All three King brothers are buried there; Carlisle (also spelled Carlyle) is not.

The Wiggins family was part of the “hanging justice” crowd, Crippen said. Over their family plot, they planted a camphor tree that now shades most of the graveyard.

Dotting the grounds, Hinkel said, are markers for John Holt, a Mormon polygamist and veteran of the War of 1812; William C. Bullard, a soldier in Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army; and Albert Waldron, a Yankee soldier who took part in Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous March to the Sea during the Civil War.

Then there’s Billie Dodson.

At the turn of the 20th century, William “Billie” Dodson was a milliner and dress designer who catered to a faithful clientele: women who insisted on the right accessories for fashionable events. He was also a female impersonator who squeezed into a corset for stage performances.

“I’m just feminine in my nature -- that’s all,” Dodson told The Times in 1907. “I always did walk and talk like a girl. And I never did like to do boys’ things.”

He died at 42, in 1914, and was buried at Savannah, according to the burial directory. His grave is unmarked.

Another unusual “resident” is Liora Young, 84, who died in 1905 in her Boyle Heights home. When officials found her body, they also discovered the skeleton of her daughter, Liora Thompson, 27 -- who had died more than 25 years earlier. According to relatives quoted in a Times story, Young couldn’t bear to part with her daughter’s remains. The women are buried side by side.

The El Monte Cemetery Assn. incorporated in 1920. Eight years later, when the city widened Valley Boulevard, construction crews unearthed dozens of sets of human remains outside the cemetery fence. Most of the skeletons were reburied in the graveyard, but some had deteriorated so much that workers left them and simply paved over them.

“Legend has it that families who couldn’t afford to bury young children would often slip over the cemetery fence and dig a small, unmarked grave,” Crippen said.

Fast forward to today and the escalating price of upkeep.

“Water costs are up” and the El Monte Cemetery Board’s reserve is dwindling, said Bob Bruesch, a board member. “The account is now under $50,000, and it costs about $30,000 a year to maintain. Limited space is available, with fewer than 50 plots left.”

But there’s hope: More than 100 descendants and friends gathered July 15 for the cemetery association’s annual meeting. They accepted the resignation of five board members and elected eight members.

No one wants to see what occurred in Ventura happen here, Hinkel said. In 1965, The Times has reported, more than 600 tombstones were tossed into a canyon, and the graves were covered with grass. It’s now Cemetery Memorial Park.

Newly elected cemetery board President Eric Chase, among others, wants Savannah designated a state historic landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The website of the Friends of Savannah Pioneer Cemetery is:

www.savannahpioneercem.blogspot.com