Old Calvary Cemetery in Salinas/Castroville

This is a survey of the current state of the Old Calvary Cemetery on Highway 183 between Salinas and Castroville. A fascinating cemetery, even though it is in disrepair now.
Old Calvary Cemetery is a mostly derelict and dilapidated cemetery located on Highway 183 between Castroville and Salinas, California. Though it is difficult to perceive today, many important personages are buried in Old Calvary, including multiple Salinas Valley pioneer families. The cemetery got its start when landowner George Graves set aside two acres of his own farmland and deeded it to the Catholic church to be used as a burial ground for Christians.[1]
The earliest graves in the cemetery date to the early 1870s and belong to the Sobranes family, who are Monterey County pioneers. The most recent burial is Dolores Mae Hartnell, also a member of an area pioneer family, who was curiously buried there in 2018, fifty-eight years after the cemetery closed in 1960. Several notable people are also interred in the cemetery, including Jose Eusebio Boronda, who built an adobe house in 1846 that still stands today and is both the only surviving rancho adobe home in the Salinas Valley and the oldest standing house in the Salinas Valley.[2] A German baroness named Charlotte Von Ende is also buried in the cemetery and interred along with her daughter Josephine Clifford McCrackin, a California writer and poet of some note.[3]
During the period of time the cemetery was in operation, from 1870-1960, the Salinas area would have been heavily Christian demographically, largely Catholic-Christian, and the cemetery demonstrates what one might expect, with over eighty percent of the gravestone markers showing some evidence of Christian iconography, and no evidence or sign of other religions being represented.[4] Given that the cemetery was only in operation for approximately 90 years and that it was run by the Catholic church, little obvious evidence exists to indicate changing religious values.
Historian Anita Mason notes that the cemetery contains over 1000 graves in total, and there are representatives of “every ethnicity that has settled” in the Salinas Valley.[5] The period from 1910-1920 has the most recorded burials, 192, likely attributable to the impact of World War 1 and the Spanish Flu epidemic. From a socio-economic perspective, Old Calvary quite obviously served both rich and poor alike. There are large mausoleums that utilized copious amounts of marble and concrete in their construction, and several large, ornate statues that decorate the cemetery in various parts. On a lower economic level but still costing a considerable sum, there are numerous marble markers spread throughout the cemetery that show clear elements of professional design and engraving. Interspersed between those crypts, statues, and carved stones of the rich, one also finds markers of much lesser quality and engraving, some made of concrete and other types of inexpensive stone, and there are hundreds of unmarked crosses that are all throughout the cemetery, though many are concentrated in the southeast corner of the graveyard, which appears to have been largely reserved, along with the southwest corner, for those of lower economic means. Also in the southeast corner, one finds a higher concentration of graves for children and infants, though adult graves are also found there, so it is not an exclusively children’s section.
The cemetery itself, as noted above, is not in excellent condition, largely because the Monterey Catholic Diocese does not have enough money budgeted for upkeep.[6] Despite two different renovations in the last twenty years, the grave markers and paths between them show signs of neglect, like trash, broken markers, rodent infestation, and weed overgrowth. The current condition is somewhat sad, considering the efforts of John Futini and the Old Calvary Cemetery Restoration Commission, who spent seven years and over $120,000 in the early twenty-first century restoring the cemetery. Futini himself died in 2018, and despite the fact that his parents are buried at Old Calvary and he spent a large portion of his life seeking to restore the cemetery, he himself is buried elsewhere.[7]
Footnotes:
[1] Dave Nordstrand, “Group Wants To Save Deserted Cemetery, which is home to pioneer family plots,” The Californian, April 24, 2004, Central Coast Living, 29.
[2] Susan Brown, “Jose Eusebio Boronda Adobe,” Soul of CA, accessed September 5, 2024, soulofca.org/j....
[3] Eduardo Cuevas, “Families Give Salinas Cemetery New Life,” The Californian, May 25, 2018, 11.
[5] Cuevas, Families Give Salinas Cemetery New Life, 11.
[7] Montereyherald.com, “John Joseph Futini,” Monterey Herald, May 28, www.montereyhe....