1880-Bodie Cemetery
“Dead House” and where the Glass Horse-Drawn Hearse was stored. Sage covered Bodie Cemetery.
“the Dearly Departed” and the Need for a “Bodie Cemetery”….
As the early pioneers of the mining camp “met their maker,” the “Dearly Departed” were taken to early Cemeteries in neighboring towns of Aurora and Bridgeport. The 13 mile trek over the terrain, to those cemeteries was an ordeal of inconvenience. Winter storms and snow depths made it impossible for the mule pulled freight-wagons to leave Bodie. Necessity was the choice for Bodie having a graveyard.
The “swampy” flat at the southern end of the Bodie Mining camp, provided a much more convenient location for interments and became the site of Boot Hill. Only there was a problem with the water table. Here the water table was so high, graves often flooded with water.
In the year 1877, graves with markers intact were moved 880 feet to the “new hillside location,” which became Mono County’s Bodie Cemetery. (It is unknown how many unmarked graves remain hidden in the original “swampy” section of the original Cemetery.)
By 1880 as Bodie’s population had reached - 2,712 citizens, with 350 Chinese immigrants according to the Federal Census of 1880. The Standard Mine Explosion of July 11, 1879- killed five men- and wounded about 11 more. Burial ground needed to be within the township and closer to the mines, where miners faced the dangerous and often catastrophic daily work life.
Death tolls inevitably rose as a result of both disaster’s and disease. The Bodie Cemetery grew to three discrete burial areas. The boundaries of the Bodies “three cemeteries” were separated by an enclosured fence. The “fenced sections” were Bodie Masonic Lodge No. 252- Masonic Cemetery, Bodie Miners’ Union Cemetery, and undertaker Henry Wards “IOOF” Cemetery, or “Wards Cemetery.”
The “deceased miners, their wives and children” were buried “Within the fence in the Private Paid Cemetery.” The fenced Bodie Cemetery kept out the wandering cattle, that could trample and destroy the graves. The family-plot layout was “paid-for plots- with markers of stone, and individual plot fences.”
The Mono County “Indigent Cemetery” was a by “Death-Date-Burial.” Unmarked graves and unfenced for any signification of the persons identity name or deathdate. The outcasts or “un-respectable”- the bad men and women- were buried “outside the fence in the “pauper cemetery.” Chinese immigrant workers were also buried indigent, and in unmarked graves, which today are sage-cover and unknown location. What is know two know former “fallen women” are buried outside the fence. (Rose May grave is identified. Mrs. Drapers grave can not be identified.)
Near the fenced entrance to the cemetery, a brick Morgue was built. Also known as the Dead House, bodies were stored here during Bodie’s harsh Winters ,when the ground was so frozen that funerals had to be delayed. Blasting powder was sometimes deployed to loosen ice and snow so graves could be dug.
During these fierce Winters, “wooden sleds were drawn through the snow” instead of the ornate Horse Drawn Hearses.