Memorial Park (cemetery) (Ventura, California)

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1273 East Main Street
Ventura, CA 93001
www.cityofventura.net/cmp

3,000 of Ventura County's dead are still buried here.
In the mid-1960s, the city removed all of the grave markers and transformed the space into a park.
Opened as Saint Mary's Cemetery in 1862 when friars at San Buenaventura Mission were looking for more spacious burial grounds, for years it was owned and operated by the Catholic Church.
By 1943 the cemetery was nearly full and had fallen into disrepair. Weeds overtook family plots that once had been carefully tended, and vandals carried off old grave markers.The city banned any more burials there in 1944.
By then the city had assumed control of portions of the cemetery reserved for Presbyterians, Jews and Chinese, and in the 1950s the city bought one acre of the land to build a recreation center.
Years of talk about turning the burial ground into a park got serious in 1963, when the city began removing headstones and crypts without any apparent controversy.
By the late 1960s, city leaders had unceremoniously removed all of the grave markers and transformed the cemetery into a city park.
The heavy markers were stored in a city-owned canyon north of Ventura, and relatives were sent letters requesting that they come and claim them. Unclaimed markers stayed in Hall Canyon for seven years.
In 1972, about 500 that remained were hauled to Olivas Park Golf Course, where they were broken up and used as rubble for a levee.
There were occasional cases of errant tombstones found in creeks and canyons downstream of the city yard, and in 1993 a smooth granite stone bearing the name of "Mother Ida May Shively" was found on the rocky shore at Surfer's Point. (Shively was buried at Saint Mary's in 1901, a week after giving birth to a daughter. The heavy stone was retrieved by that daughter, then 91.)
William Dewey Hobson, the "father of Ventura County," who lobbied to see the area become its own county in 1873, is buried here.
Also buried here is Brig. Gen. William Vandever, who commanded troops in the Civil War and was a two-term congressman.
The city's first lawyers, doctors, teachers and civic leaders are all buried here, along with tradesmen, laborers and farmwives, almost all of them in umarked graves.

For more info, see www.restorestmarys.org