Historic Inland Empire cemetery receives federal funds

Leticia Juarez
KABC-TV Los Angeles

ORO GRANDE, MOJAVE DESERT (KABC) -- A historic cemetery in Oro Grande near Victorville has been called a little-known treasure. It has some 100 graves, the final resting place of mostly miners and their families. There is a much-needed facelift in its future.

A steady wind blows through the Oro Grande Cemetery where flagstones outline the final resting places and weathered white crosses mark the area for the inhabitants buried there. It is a place forgotten by time.

Joe Manners is the unofficial caretaker of the century-old cemetery, and its champion.

For more than two decades, he has been after San Bernardino County to fund its upkeep and repairs.

"Some of that history, we should have something in Oro Grande to remember that Oro Grande was a boom town when Victorville was a ranch," said Manners.

On Wednesday the county approved a $15,000 grant to build a parking lot and decorative fence to beautify the historic site. Prior to the funding approval the county used ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked graves to ensure the area would not be disturbed by the construction.

"We were able to get some community development block-grant funding from the federal government -- a small grant, but enough to do some basic improvements," said Brad Mitzelfelt, San Bernardino County First District supervisor.

There are between 90 and 100 graves in the Oro Grande Cemetery. Many belong to the original founders of this once-booming town.

The gold-mining town is one of the earliest settlements in San Bernardino County and the final resting place for several of Oro Grande's military heroes.

"When Memorial Day comes around, the VFW in Adelanto comes and clears all the weeds and gets the place cleaned up and they do a Memorial Day service," said Manners.

The county hopes to finish its improvement project by Memorial Day in time to honor and remember the pioneers and founders of this desert community.

Sprucing up Palmdale's historic grave sites

Time is running out for descendants of the city's settlers to improve plots at a cemetery that the city will soon take over as Pioneer Memorial Park.

Marge Kimbrough, 81, right, visits family members’ graves with granddaughter Holly Kimbrough, left, daughters Kristi Kimbrough and Renee Kimbrough Kroeger and Renee’s husband, John Kroeger. Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

By Ann M. Simmons
Los Angeles Times

Glen Settle, 97, knew he had to act fast.

The concrete marker on the grave of his sister Aileen, who died in 1918 at just 3 days old, was worn and faded. It needed to be replaced.

So earlier this month, a friend helped Settle erect a new gray granite stone engraved with a baby angel at the plot in the Historic Palmdale Cemetery.

Settle is among a group of descendants of the city's early settlers buried in the cemetery who are rushing to repair or replace grave markers, monuments and headstones before a July 16 deadline, when the city will take over general maintenance of the property that will be rededicated as Pioneer Memorial Park.

The cemetery will be closed to future renovations and burials, unless people can prove they owned plots before the city's 2006 resolution to close the grounds to interment. The cemetery includes at least 200 graves, and they will be maintained as they are now.

"It's nice to know that it will be taken care of now," said Settle, whose family arrived in Palmdale in 1908. "I think it means a lot to the old-timers."

The cemetery is one of the few reminders of the early Palmdale settlement known as "Palmenthal," said city spokesman John Mlynar. About 60 families of Swiss and German descent traveled mainly from Nebraska and Illinois and settled in the area in 1886.

They founded a Lutheran church. One family donated 20 acres to the church, which includes about 2 1/2 acres at the northeast corner of 20th Street East and Avenue S that are known to have graves. By 1899, most of the pioneers had moved away from Palmenthal because of drought, land deed issues and competition from a neighboring community called Harold, in an area now known as central Palmdale. The newcomers settled closer to the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks, Mlynar said.

The cemetery continued to be used by other settlers, but it eventually fell into disrepair, a victim of overgrown vegetation, graffiti, trash and vandalism. The last burial on record was in 2001, but that remains in dispute because the former property owner officially closed the cemetery to burials in 1999.

In 2006, the city committed about $220,000 to clean up the cemetery, with $30,000 more allocated for annual maintenance of the site. Ground-penetrating radar equipment was used to check for additional unmarked graves, Mlynar said. In 2008, a wrought iron fence was erected around the cemetery to guard against further destruction.

"The city and the community respect this place as the final resting place of the pioneers of the city," said Noel Doran, Palmdale's deputy city attorney, who has helped steer the municipality through the legal process of creating a pioneer park. "It's an opportunity for our generation and future generations to connect to the past."

Genealogists and historians praised Palmdale's efforts to create a pioneer memorial park at a time when some cities and counties are allowing historic cemeteries to languish.

Sue Silver, state coordinator for California Saving Graves, a group dedicated to preserving and restoring endangered and forgotten cemeteries, said human "apathy and moral decay" had contributed to the demise of some of these historic sites.

"To me it's not a matter of economics, it's a matter of being ready and willing to commit the time and the effort," Silver said, noting that Palmdale "deserves a lot of credit."

Some jurisdictions have been slammed for allowing historic cemeteries to be turned into play parks and soccer fields. In the early 1970s, outrage erupted over a decision to convert a portion of San Diego's Calvary Cemetery into a public park. And today, some Ventura residents are fighting to get the city's Cemetery Memorial Park restored to its original state. In the mid-1960s, the grave markers of more than 3,000 of the city's most influential pioneers were unceremoniously removed, and the cemetery was transformed into a city park.

At the Palmdale cemetery, grave markers bear names of pioneer families, including Jonas, Nagel, Ritter and Munz. Descendants recalled that they created a town with stores, a blacksmith shop, a bakery and a shoe shop.

Barry Munz, 48, whose great-grandparents are among those buried in the historic graveyard, said his descendants were grain and livestock farmers. Historical records show that one of the Munzes' started a pioneer turkey ranch in Antelope Valley and developed the Holland strain of white turkey.

Ralph Ritter, 80, recalled that pioneer members of his family owned an abundance of land, flourishing orchards and a winery. His grandfather had immigrated to the U.S. from Germany and later moved to California.

Other early families included the Settles, Kimbroughs and Coursons.

Plots lie in clusters across the rugged desert floor, spotted with California junipers, Italian cypress and at least one Joshua tree. A horseshoe-shaped path made of decomposed granite allows passage around the graves.

Relatives of the deceased have been encouraged to place grave markers, monuments, headstones and other embellishments in accordance with the cemetery's simple, non-gaudy style. Walkways, statues and gargoyles are not allowed for individual graves.

Marge Kimbrough, 81, whose deceased husband is among 11 Kimbrough family members buried in a cordoned-off lot at the cemetery, said she was thrilled that the graveyard was being preserved.

"We are such a transient state, it's important to keep some of the old legends from the past," Kimbrough said. "I think we all like to feel our roots."

Munz said that given the cemetery's age and prior deteriorating state, "something needed to be done. The city stepping in was by far the best for the overall community."

Bagdad Fades Into the Desert--in California

Postcard image of Bagdad on Route 66 in 1939 (Burton Frasher)

By CHARLES HILLINGER
Los Angeles Times

BAGDAD, Calif. — Ever since Iraq invaded Kuwait, curious motorists passing through the Mojave Desert have stopped to ask the way to Bagdad, the California ghost town named in the 1800s for the Middle Eastern capital.

"Every day they come into our gas station or restaurant and ask, 'Where's Bagdad? We can't find it,' " said Buster Burris, 81, owner of the town of Amboy, population 27, eight miles east of where maps indicate Bagdad is located.

Burris tells them Bagdad is but a memory these days.

Situated in the middle of the desert, Bagdad is 75 miles southeast of Barstow on old Route 66 in a long valley between the Bristol and Bullion mountains.

Today, its only inhabitants are snakes, lizards, scorpions, pack rats and an assortment of other wildlife. There's a lone palm tree, half a dozen scraggly salt cedars and a scattering of sagebrush growing in the desert sand.

Bagdad has always been one of the driest places in the United States. It recorded the longest period of drought anywhere in the history of the country from July, 1912, to November, 1914: 767 consecutive days without precipitation.

There is an eerie quiet here that is broken from time to time by the 30 to 40 trains that rumble through Bagdad each day.

In 1883, railroad officials who dubbed two nearby settlements Siberia and Klondike named this desert town after the Iraqi capital, omitting the "h" in a divergent spelling for the city on the Tigris. As many as 50 Chinese railroad workers died while laying tracks, falling victim to a cholera epidemic. An unmarked burial ground is believed to be somewhere nearby.

A "Bagdad" sign, along the mainline Santa Fe tracks marks the site of the town that boomed from the late 1800s through the early 1900s, finally gasping its last breath in the late 1960s.

Bagdad was an important railhead, a watering place for railroad engines during steam days and a center for nearby gold, silver, copper and lava mining camps--for mines such as the Orange Blossom, War Eagle and Lady Lou.

There were homes, hotels, saloons and stores here, a post office from 1889 to 1923, a school, a passenger railway station and a Harvey House restaurant. By the 1940s, however, all that remained was the depot, a few homes, the Bagdad Cafe, a gas station and cabins for overnight stays on U.S. 66.

Its population dwindled from a few hundred during its heyday to fewer than 20 in the mid-1940s, when Paul Limon worked here pumping gas at 23 cents a gallon. Limon, now 63, lives in Cadiz, 20 miles east of Bagdad. He recalled the town as he knew it during the 1940s and 1950s:

"Bagdad was a lively little place. People from all over the desert would come here because of the Bagdad Cafe, owned and operated by a woman named Alice Lawrence. The Bagdad Cafe was the only place for miles around with a dance floor and juke box.

"The Bagdad Cafe was a happy-go-lucky, popular spot. When I hear or read about the war in the Persian Gulf and Baghdad is mentioned, I think about Bagdad, Calif., and all the good times I had in this town," Limon said during a sentimental visit here. Many who drove U.S. 66, America's main street from the Midwest to California, will remember Bagdad, allowed Limon.

"Overheated cars from every state would stop to get water. Cars in those days were always boiling over. And a lot of those people ate in the Bagdad Cafe."

In fact, the town served as the original inspiration for the 1988 movie and subsequent television program, "Bagdad Cafe"--which was actually filmed at the Sidewinder Cafe in Newberry Springs, 40 miles to the northwest.

Percy Adlon, 55, a German film producer and founder of the Pelemele Film Corp., said he and his wife were driving in the desert in 1985 and, noticing Bagdad on the map, went off in search of the town.

They never did find it, but the name intrigued Adlon so much that he produced a film about "a Bavarian lady stranded in the desert in a cafe next to a dusty hotel," he said Wednesday in an interview. A CBS series that spun off the film starred Whoopie Goldberg and Jean Stapleton and ran 19 episodes before it was canceled in November.

Bagdad was bypassed in 1972 when Interstate 40 opened 20 miles to the north and the two-lane stretch of Route 66 through here became a deserted, seldom-used road.

But Bagdad had died years before the freeway opened. And the cafe, depot and what few structures remained were destroyed by vandals.

A network of dirt streets outline the town that was. Two speed-limits signs--15 m.p.h.--still stand. Concrete building foundations, rusted automotive parts, mining equipment and pipes, shattered glass and dinnerware, old pots and pans and other debris litter the area.

"This is where the Bagdad Cafe and gas station were," said Limon, standing on what is left of the eatery--the front steps.

He drove over the dirt streets to the old Bagdad Cemetery, a handful of graves marked with weathered crosses with names no longer legible. Signs were evident that grave robbers had recently desecrated the final resting place of Bagdad residents who died here in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

"This really sickens me," sighed Limon, as he looked down at holes dug at two of the grave sites.