Historic Palmdale Cemetery (Palmdale, California)

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This cemetery includes at least 200 graves, some of which may date from the 1880s.
The last recorded burial was in 2001, but that remains in dispute because the former property owner officially closed the cemetery to burials in 1999.
As of July 2009, the old Palmdale (originally Palmenthal) Cemetery is to rededicated by the City of Palmdale as Pioneer Memorial Park.
This cemetery is one of the few reminders of the early Palmenthal settlement.
About 60 families of Swiss and German descent, mainly from Nebraska and Illinois, settled in the area in 1886. They founded a Lutheran church. One family donated 20 acres to the church, which includes these 2 1/2 acres 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 (now known as central Palmdale.) The newcomers settled in Harold to be closer to the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks.
The cemetery continued to be used by other settlers, but it eventually fell into disrepair, a victim of overgrown vegetation, graffiti, trash and vandalism.
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.
In 2008, a wrought iron fence was erected around the cemetery to guard against further destruction.
The City of Palmdale decided to protect the old Palmdale Cemetery (once the "Palmenthal-Friedhof", and soon to be the "Pioneer Memorial Park") to insure that it didn't suffer a fate such as the old Catholic cemetery in Ventura (California) which in 1965 was turned into a city park and soccer field, with it's 2000 grave markers being unceremoniously dumped into a land fill.