Sacramento’s earliest cemetery is now the site of a school. What happened to the graves?

What happened to Sue Robinson’s body and headstone is, like so much associated with New Helvetia Cemetery, something of a mystery.

Robinson was among Sacramento’s 19th century elite that were buried in one of the city’s earliest cemeteries.

A famed actress and dancer, Robinson died in 1871 at 26, with her tombstone falling into disrepair within 20 years, according to news clippings included in a file for New Helvetia at the Sacramento Room at Central Library. By the time more than 5,000 bodies were exhumed from New Helvetia in the mid-1950s so Miwok Middle School could be built, Robinson’s headstone was likely long gone.

The website FindaGrave.com lists Robinson as still being interred at New Helvetia, an impossibility. More than likely, she wound up where 4,690 other people who were disinterred from New Helvetia during the 1950s did: In a mass grave with 100 headstones at East Lawn Cemetery.

New Helvetia Cemetery dates to 1845 and was originally a burial ground for nearby Sutter’s Fort. Notable people buried in the cemetery included Sacramento’s first elected mayor Hardin Bigelow, two-term U.S. congressman Marion Biggs and Donner Party member Phillipine Keseberg (whose first name is spelled as it is on her headstone but varies in other records).

With shoddy records kept throughout New Helvetia’s existence, the full story and the identities of everyone once buried there might never be known. All the same, the cemetery is an important part of early Sacramento history. And new details about the place keep coming to light.

Canvassing for headstones

Bob LaPerriere wants to get a canvassing group together.

LaPerriere, chair of the Sacramento County Cemetery Advisory Commission, helped lead the recovery some years ago of 72 flat grave markers from New Helvetia that wound up in two backyards in East Sacramento.

The city had put these stones, which are about the size of shoeboxes, down in the 1910s when it converted New Helvetia into a park but left bodies in the ground. When bodies were exhumed from October 1955 to March 1956, the markers were stacked in the street which is how they wound up on nearby properties, LaPerriere said.

LaPerriere took the 72 recovered markers by horse and wagon to East Lawn in 2008, telling the Sacramento Bee then, “I thought the horse and wagon would add something of the era and a little interest. If we just drove them over, nobody would know.”

The headstones are on display in a part of the cemetery where people from New Helvetia are buried en masse. In the years since, approximately 10 more headstones have been found, though LaPerriere suspects this isn’t everything.

“I’m sure there’s probably more grave markers that are lying somewhere around there among some of those homes,” LaPerriere said.

Stones that appear to have come from New Helvetia have kept turning up in recent years, even recent months.

In Lori Bauder’s office at Old City Cemetery, there’s a broken headstone that a Teichert Construction worker brought over in the last 6-8 months. The worker had found it at a job site in East Sacramento. Bauder, the city’s cemetery manager, would now like to find someone who can translate the language on the headstone, which might be Mandarin.

Elsewhere in Old City Cemetery is a plot dedicated to some of the 410 people from New Helvetia who were reinterred there. The plot includes a gravestone for four members of the Asch or Ash family, with spellings varying between records. Valley Community News noted that the headstone was found half-buried in an Auburn yard in 2010, where it had been since 1956.

Megan Crose, a park maintenance worker at the cemetery met descendants of the family when they traveled there for a ceremony to mark the gravestone’s return. They told her the story of why one member of the family, named on the headstone as Franz Louis Asch had died in 1877: murdered in a house of ill repute.

Other headstones, even ones with possible historical significance, might never be found. A collection at the Center for Sacramento History includes a memo book for New Helvetia from the mid-1910s when the city was replacing old headstones with flat grave markers to create a park.

An entry in the book, from April 11, 1916 notes that a phone call had been put in to Minnie Johnson, then First Lady of California, whose parents, Archibald and Lucretia McNeal were buried at New Helvetia. The memo book noted that their monument would be donated “to the worthy poor” and that Johnson approved of the plan.

Archibald had been buried in a plot at New Helvetia with Lucretia, his first wife Mary Alice McNeal and their infant child, according to records in the CSH collection. Today, only the location of Mary’s body, reinterred at Old City Cemetery, is precisely known.

Preserving a legacy

When city officials began to talk around the early 1950s of disinterring bodies from the former New Helvetia site, local leaders suggested there were maybe 1,200 bodies in the ground. A total of 5,235 sets of remains were unearthed, with so many bodies found that the price of reinterment had to be lowered.

Marcia Eymann, Sacramento’s city historian, blamed poor records in part on the vast discrepancy in the number of bodies suspected to be at New Helvetia compared to those that were actually found.

“Another factor to consider, which happens in a lot of burial grounds is that the original markers were wood and as those things fail – which they do over time and disintegrate – and if there weren’t really strong records to begin with, those people are lost,” Eymann said. “And that is very common in so many cemeteries.”

Like the former Alhambra Theatre that was across J Street, New Helvetia is long gone, a distant memory perhaps for older Sacramentans. Still, the cemetery hasn’t faded entirely from local consciousness.

Eymann has helped work with Bauder to preserve New Helvetia’s legacy. The two collaborated on a project in recent years to install a sign near Broadway at Old City Cemetery commemorating the names of people reinterred there from New Helvetia.

Preston Murray, family service counselor at East Lawn, pointed to the diversity of New Helvetia, which had everyone interred from Chinese immigrants to leaders of local law enforcement and clergy. “It’s the story of Sacramento and the story of Sacramento in a lot of ways is the story of California,” Murray said.

LaPerriere sees the value, too, in remembering New Helvetia.

“It shows how many people that were really important in developing the city of Sacramento had been forgotten – partly forgotten because their gravesites had been neglected or forgotten or removed,” LaPerriere said. “It really helps us to reflect back in our history and kind of remind us that we really don’t want things like that to keep happening.”

If you want to help

What: Translating language on recently-recovered headstone possibly from New Helvetia Cemetery

Where: Lori Bauder’s office at Old City Cemetery, 1000 Broadway, Sacramento

Hours: 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily

Phone: (916) 448-0811