Bringing a Cemetery Back to Life

SANTA ROSA — In the dappled cool of a crumbling cemetery, George Magner coaxes stories out of stones.

He’s not a conjurer. He’s about as down-to-earth as they come. But he spends much of his retirement in the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery.

He loves it there, respects its battered elegance. And along with two dozen other volunteers, he’s determined to rescue it from ruin.

In a remarkable display of devotion to the dead--and to history and memory and folklore as well--these volunteers have set about restoring graves that date back to 1854. They’ve cleared away brambles, pieced together tombstones and mapped out burial sites. Rifling through Santa Rosa’s history, they’ve also researched the lives of those buried in the cemetery, uncovering tales of lust and greed, heroism and tragedy.

“Most people think of cemeteries as all sadness. I look at this as history,” said Magner, 73, a retired military aircraft electrician with a peppy step and work-roughened hands. “I don’t feel like I’m isolated when I’m working up here. . . . When I come home [after cleaning pioneers’ tombstones], I tell my wife, ‘I washed their faces today.’ ”

Similar cemetery restoration efforts are in gear across the nation, reflecting a recent surge of affection for historic burial grounds long ago abandoned to vandals, lichen and acid rain. These aren’t dutiful descendants plodding once a year to dust off grandma’s grave; these are strangers devoting 20 or 30 hours a week to preserve the graves of town founders, war veterans and ordinary citizens from eras past.

“A terrific amount of energy and information is coming to the fore,” said Elisabeth Potter, a cemetery expert with the Oregon Historic Preservation Office. “People are coming together to protect these assets that are part of our collective heritage.”

Certainly, volunteers have worked marvels in this wine country town an hour north of San Francisco.

When they came across the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery three years ago, blackberry brambles 10 feet high obscured the paths and teens had made a game of smashing old tombstones like beer bottles.

The devastation gave the cemetery a sullen personality. Though designed like a park, with gentle hills and shading oaks, it had grown so scruffy that it offered no shelter for strollers, no comfort for mourners. Even genealogy buffs had little use for it because there was no accurate chart of burial plots.

The city of Santa Rosa had taken over the cemetery from its bankrupt corporate owners in 1979 but did little to maintain it. (The only real cleanup initiative turned calamitous when fires set to clear away brush ended up burning wooden grave markers.)

The cemetery was so thoroughly neglected that one unpruned tree literally grew around a rusty gate, enfolding the wrought iron in its bark. Except on dares, few ventured onto the disheveled grounds.

That is, until the local newspaper published photos of the place.

In the next two days, 150 people volunteered to help.

Led by Bill Montgomery, the city’s deputy director of parks, the volunteers have poured at least 20,000 hours of work into the cemetery. Few realized they were part of a national movement to salvage historic burial grounds; they joined the effort out of the simple conviction that all graves, however old, deserve to be treated with dignity.

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The same motivation has spurred similar restoration work from Massachusetts to Oregon, New Hampshire to Texas. “You may not ever know about it or hear about it, but it’s out there,” said Laurel Gable, a researcher with the Assn. for Gravestone Studies, which boasts 1,700 members worldwide.

Because many restoration efforts are so informal, the association does not attempt to count them. Some communities, such as San Juan Capistrano, organize cleanup days once a year. Others rely on Boy Scouts for occasional weeding around tombstones. Sometimes amateur genealogists take over the chores to further their research. Other cities hire professional preservationists.

In Santa Rosa, the City Council contributes $5,000 to $7,000 a year for supplies and equipment. But all the sweat comes from volunteers.

They have mended paupers’ tombs--simple concrete slabs with names and dates scratched in an unsteady hand. They have pieced together more costly gravestones, too, carved with cherubs or inscribed with the exact time of death, down to the very minute. Right now they’re looking for 120 Civil War-era cannonballs to set around the veterans memorial because the originals were melted down during World War II.

“I feel like I’m doing something worthwhile, carrying on the old,” said 73-year-old volunteer Dwain Campbell.

Such enthusiasm for preserving history does have its perils. Amateur do-gooders have been known to damage tombstones by whitewashing marble or slathering stone with preservatives. But the Santa Rosa volunteers have consulted a tombstone expert for proper restoration techniques.

Under their guidance, the old burial ground, once an embarrassment, has become an amenity for this city of 128,000.

“It looks like people care about it again,” said Judy Enochs, who lives near the cemetery and often walks her dog through its 17 acres.

Indeed, if ever a cemetery can be described as lively, Santa Rosa’s qualifies.

Students take tours given by volunteers in period costume--Montgomery in a blue woolen Civil War uniform, or Kay Voliva in the garb of a World War I nurse.

Several dozen residents have “adopted” graves and pledged to tend them at least four times a year.

And tourists who stop off to look for long-lost ancestors have a fair shot at actually finding them now that volunteers have mapped out burial sites. When Rolling Hills Estates resident Ken Hudson swung by in May, for example, he found three generations of ancestors going back to his great-great-grandfather. “It was just like opening a treasure vault,” he said. “If we hadn’t run out of clothes and money, we’d probably still be there.”

In recognition of the restoration, the City Council next month will consider honoring the cemetery as a local landmark. Montgomery hopes to one day nominate the cemetery for still higher honors. California already boasts 14 cemeteries on the National Register of Historic Places, including the Mission San Jose and the Workman Family Cemetery in Industry. In addition, the state has named 28 cemeteries historic landmarks.

Before they can even think of applying for such status, however, the Santa Rosa volunteers have much to do.

Montgomery estimates that up to 500 of the 2,600 tombstones still need work. To raise money and interest, his crew is planning a Lamplight Tour for September: as goose-bumpy guests wander through the cemetery at dusk, characters from Santa Rosa’s history will “rise” from their graves to tell their stories.

They will have plenty of yarns to choose from.

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Volunteers such as Raymond Owen, a retired federal investigator, have uncovered in the cemetery morbid tales a century old--tales that would fit right in with today’s grim headlines.

Take, for instance, the saga of the despondent father, so depressed by his debts that he shot his three little ones and then himself. They’re all buried together on a grassy hill. Or consider the fate of the stingy couple who refused to pay a hired hand his due because the stack of wood he piled for them fell short of expectations. The stiffed laborer killed the man and wife on the spot.

“I guess it shows life isn’t much different now than it was then,” mused volunteer Margaret Phinney, 73. “There’s even a continuity of crime.”

Phinney, a retired teacher, keeps cemetery boosters up to date on repair work by producing a monthly newsletter for 200 subscribers. Her husband, Alan, prefers manual labor: He once devised an old-fashioned pulley to hoist a toppled 200-pound tombstone without damaging it.

Like the two dozen other stalwart cemetery volunteers, the Phinneys fashion themselves detectives. Probing forsaken corners of the cemetery with broomsticks, they have come across graves buried for decades under debris. Just the other day, they found matching his-and-hers wooden markers nearly 60 years old.

“It’s like a treasure hunt,” Magner said.

Perched on a tombstone in work clothes and suspenders, his radio tuned to 1940s swing, Magner spends four to six hours a day piecing together shattered markers. Deer sometimes nibble fruit from the trees. Jack rabbits bound through shifting shadows. He finds it peaceful and satisfying.

And sometimes, sad.

As he moves from stone to stone, Magner has charted the course of devastating epidemics that wiped out whole families at a time. One family plot inters 10 children--and the mother who outlived them all.

Most wrenching of all are the two little Strom sisters, buried side by side in 1877. Their tombstones have been smashed beyond even Magner’s most loving attempts to save them. From the carvings he’s been able to piece together, it’s clear one of the girls died when she was 4. The only indication of her sister’s age is a chunk of stone that reads “days.”

“I can’t find all the pieces for their headstones. That touches me,” Magner said. Bending to study the ragged fragments of the baby’s tomb, he added: “It kind of tugs at you once in a while.”