Peña Adobe Park

California

A graveyard here was left to sheep, with nearly four hundred wooden grave markers still standing.

historical

For a few years around 1920, a burial ground here was rented out to sheep. The cemetery covered about thirty thousand square feet and held roughly three hundred eighty-nine graves, each marked with wood. A rancher named William B. O'Connor bought the land and put his flock on it. The markers stayed where they were. The graveyard had already fallen into disrepair, and it had been moved more than once before that. The graves were finally moved again in May of nineteen sixty-six. The old cemetery site sits on the northern trail of the park. Farther along the same trail is a grove of fruit and nut trees planted in eighteen fifty by two men named William Jack and Charles Hume. By eighteen ninety-seven a railroad line ran right out to the grove so the crops could be hauled to San Francisco and sold. Both sites are on land that was once the Mexican land grant Rancho Los Putos.

Wayside reads this to you as you drive past, timed to arrive before the place does. Plan a route through here.

What this was written from
From 1917 to 1920 the 30,000-square-foot graveyard had about 389 wooden marked graves abandoned and the site used for sheep grazing by rancher, William B. O’Connor who had bought the land.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

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