Palm Cemetery Research Paper

For many years the location of Palm Cemetery was unknown. Called "Palm Cemetery" because of the lone palm tree marking the location, it was available free-of-charge to anyone not able to come up with the $10 burial fee at Sunnyside, or not able to transfer the body the four miles to the pauper 's field area of the Municipal Cemetery. The cemetery grounds had been used by the Bixby’s for years as a burial place for their Rancho Los Cerritos workers, but anyone could be buried there without a fee. During the obituary indexing project at Long Beach Public Library, the burial place of several of those who died in Long Beach was listed as Palm Cemetery, but where was it? Long Beach historian Loretta Berner, who grew up on the grounds of the Rancho Los Cerritos, believed it had been incorporated into the Forest Lawn/Sunnyside Cemetery on San Antonio Drive, but she had no proof. Every time I visited Forest Lawn/Sunnyside I questioned staff about Palm Cemetery, no one had ever heard of it. In 2012 I happened to get a knowledgeable groundskeeper who was helping me locate the graves I was searching for. I asked him the usual question: "Do you know anything about Palm Cemetery?" and was

Several Mexicans had removed an old walnut casket from Palm Cemetery and were in the process of replacing the corpse with the body of a person who had just died when they were discovered by a cemetery employee. When F. A. Decker, secretary of the Long Beach Cemetery Association, arrived on the scene the Mexicans had already fled, but he found human bones strewn about the area of the grave. The casket, which looked to be about 25 years old, was falling to pieces. When police arrived at the cemetery they discovered the Mexicans had returned since Decker’s departure and buried a body in the grave. The identity of the Mexicans was never learned, nor was the identity of the person buried by