San Fernando Cemetery

More than six hundred people are buried here and thirteen headstones are left. Charles Maclay set aside forty acres for a burying ground in 1874 when he filed the township of San Fernando, and the first recorded burial came in 1889 — which puts the plaque's early 1800s off by most of a century. The land was sold away in pieces down to 3.8 acres. The city, the county and the state each declined to take the place on, so volunteers have held it since 1958. A radar survey in 2010 found 214 graves.

What the plaque says

This Cemetery, earlier known as Morningside Cemetery, is the oldest non-sectarian cemetery in San Fernando Valley. It was used from the early 1800's until 1939. It was legally abandoned in 1959. In this same year Mrs. Nellis S. Noble donated the site in memory of the pioneers of San Fernando as a Pioneer Memorial Park.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Cascades — 2.8 mi
  The concrete chute where the Los Angeles Aqueduct arrives, and where forty thousand people watched the Owens Valley come south in 1913.
• Mission San Fernando Rey de España — 3.3 mi
  The seventeenth Alta California mission, founded at the Tataviam village of Achoicominga, with the largest adobe building in the state standing beside it.
• Oak of the Golden Dream — 4.1 mi
  Gold was found in California here in 1842, six years before Sutter's Mill, and the oak it was found under is still standing.
• Pioneer Oil Refinery — 5.3 mi
  The first commercially successful refinery in the West, built in 1876 to take the crude coming down the pipeline from Pico Canyon.

More markers nearby

• The Cascades — 2.8 mi
• Griffith Ranch — 3.0 mi
• Mission San Fernando Rey de España — 3.3 mi
• Brand Park (Memory Garden) — 3.5 mi