Dateline>City of Angels

Ready for another brief tour of L.A.’s haunting past?

Off the beaten track, in the City of Industry, you’ll find a small but significant cemetery, known simply as El Campo Santo. Part of the six-acre Workman Temple Homestead Historical Park, the graveyard dates to 1855, and is the L.A. area’s first private burial ground. Originally, it was meant to hold the Workman, Rowland and Temple families along with their ranch workers, but through a twist of fate also became the final resting place of Pio Pico, California’s last Mexican governor, and his wife Maria Ygnacia.

As if visiting the graves of these notable Californios isn’t thrilling enough for die-hard history buffs, the site also boasts the last remaining example of decorative cast-iron fencing common to this region’s 19th Century bone yards — and perhaps a few other buried mysteries as well.

In 1841 William (aka Julian) Workman and John Rowland led the first American wagon train to California via the Old Spanish Trail. About four years later, the pair acquired title to 49,000 acres of former Mission San Gabriel lands known as Rancho La Puente, building side-by-side residences on the property. But Don Julian’s adobe included a secret defense against would-be marauders: a subterranean escapement to an Indian burial ground approximately 300 yards away.

In 1855, Workman’s brother David suffered a fatal accident and became the first family member buried near the tunnel’s exit. Soon after, a Gothic chapel and decorative fencing were added to the site. Over time, the tunnel was converted to use as a storage cellar, but tales of an underground treasure continued to circulate. Buried loot or not, however, ranch servants reportedly feared the passage, swearing it was a haven for “witchery,” ghosts and other evil manifestations. Eventually it was sealed altogether.

With the collapse of the cattle business in the 1860s, the Workmans turned to wheat and grapes and, for a time, remained wealthy enough to have famed architect E.F. Kysor remodel their ranch house in 1872. But a series of bad investments eventually doomed the ranch, and Workman committed suicide. By the 1900s a new owner had razed the cemetery chapel and abandoned the plots to desecration. In 1917, Walter P. Temple, Workman’s grandson, repurchased the property and set about rescuing the cemetery, building a new family mausoleum.

Finally, with Old Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles being closed, Temple petitioned that the remains of Pio Pico and his wife be relocated to the new digs as a tribute to the couple, who had been close friends and neighbors of his ancestors.

Today’s Homestead Museum offers visitors a chance to reflect on early L.A.’s funerary customs, which changed dramatically with the arrival of American culture in the mid-1800s. In his Cosas de California memoirs, former don Antonio F. Coronel describes the death rituals common in the Spanish-Mexican Era. First the family would hold a wake in the home of the deceased, dressing the body in a shroud resembling a simple Franciscan habit. Then, on the funeral day…

“The corpse was laid on a table covered with black cloth. Four men, changing off from time to time, were pallbearers. The priest went before with the altar boys, stopping at intervals to sing responses for the soul of the deceased. When they got to the church, high or low mass [was celebrated]. At the end of this, the procession continued in the same fashion to the cemetery, with the empty coffin following. At the cemetery the body was put in the coffin, the priest said the final benediction, and the coffin was lowered into the grave.”

By the time William Workman was laid to rest on his property in 1876, those humbler days were long gone. L.A.’s funeral industry was in full swing, with undertakers offering embalming, cosmetic reconstruction, elaborate wood, lead and glass caskets, paid mourners, fancy horse-drawn hearses and pricey brick-lined graves. In fact, Workman’s burial cost more than $500 — roughly the equivalent of several hundred acres of land at the time!

Call me a cynic, but I’d guess it was exactly that sort of unscrupulous spending that lost him the family fortune in the first place…

Visitor Info:
Homestead Museum Website

Other Sources:
Los Angeles A-Z
Tales of Mexican California
Historic Adobes of L.A. Count