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SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Some 10,000 souls were laid to rest in the old Sacramento County Burial Ground between 1927 and 1961.
There was Richard Broadus and William J Broderick; Mauda Benich and Barney Berg; Fred Storm, Mearl Stanley, Walter Stanton, Louis Martine, Clara Mareno, Frank Martinez, Sidney Moore, Lucy Montague. And infants – many infants, most identified only by gender and last name, as in Infant Girl Monen, Infant Boy Allen, or sometimes twins, like the Brook twins, the Stewart twins or the Turner twins – infant girls, all. Nameless infants, born to parents too poor to bury them.
Indigent burials are those made at county expense, and include county hospital patients, coroner’s cases, or those who lacked the money or a family willing or able to foot the bill for a private burial, according to the Sacramento County website
So they ended up here, at a cemetery on Fruitridge Road next to St. Mary’s Cemetery.
At one time, there were concrete blocks with copper plates identifying the graves (with numbers, not names), but at some point, the county stopped maintaining the 12-acre plot, and it became a repository for weeds, trash and abandoned cars, according to a report prepared by Lois Dove, a volunteer, in 2003.
The Sacramento Catholic Diocese purchased the cemetery and adjacent unused land for $1 in March 1975, and cleared the lot with plows and mowers. Since then, its fortunes have improved.
The diocese built a memorial honoring the dead there, and the grounds are now serene and well-kept – “a park-like setting with trees and shrubbery” as Dove termed it.
Lost markers were replaced with 10 massive stone tablets inscribed with the names of the dead. There are no ages or dates, as on traditional headstones – although the death dates are available in Dove’s report.
The memorial was dedicated Oct. 4, 2003 by the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, the Sacramento County Cemetery Advisory Commission, and St. Mary’s Cemetery and the Catholic Diocese.
Also at the site are the remains of 72 people exhumed from the Sacramento County Hospital Cemetery, where the U.C. Davis hospital complex now stands. A single stone at the memorial marks their presence in the cemetery.
The original plot markers were “scattered and buried as the field was mowed or plowed,” Dove said in her report.
“St. Mary’s office has a card file and plot plan. They can tell where a person was buried, however, there is no marker and the person cannot be found in a particular location.”
Before the county began to use the cemetery on Fruitridge, it used several different burial grounds, said Dr. Bob LaPerriere, who organized the Sacramento County Cemetery Advisory Commission.
In addition to Sacramento County Hospital Cemetery, New Helvetia Cemetery (which occupied the site of Sutter Middle School, although the bodies were exhumed and reinterred at East Lawn Memorial Park, according to the Sacramento County Coroner’s website) was used for indigent burials before 1927. Belleview Cemetery, now Quiet Haven Memorial Park, and the Sacramento City Historic Cemetery have also been used for indigent burials for many years.
The County no longer maintains its own cemetery for the interment of indigent remains, said County Coroner Kimberly Gin.
For years, the county has used “various cemeteries around the county for burials,” she said in an email.
The county contracts with a funeral home, which cremates the bodies, then buries them in separate, clearly marked containers in a group interment each year at a contracted cemetery, according to information on the coroner’s website.
“Now, we give back cremains to the families if they want them or we scatter them at sea with the families’ approval. If they are veterans they go back to the family or they are transported to the VA Cemetery in Dixon for burial there,” she said.
Each grave in a cemetery represents a life lived; but even a life ended too soon leaves a story behind:
