BODIE- GHOST TOWN

Sage covered- BODIE CEMETERY- graves- BODIE MINERS’ UNION CEMETERY!

~~~Today, located at 8,400 foot elevation, Bodie (Mono  County), California  is an abandoned Ghost Town. It is  a “remote Eastern Sierra location” on a state of California State Map.  Buried in Bodie are a 200 sage-brush-covered- graves, located in the three acre Bodie Township Cemetery. A Cemetery that has three distinct sections- the Wards Cemetery, the Masonic Cemetery and the Bodie Miners’ Union Cemetery.

~~~It is the “death date” that was carved into the Headstone, which gives the individual grave ,and “the engraved name on the marker” significance. The “birth and death dates” defined the deceased persons lifespan. “That date” is when the persons death became a part of mining history and Bodie Township history.  Bodie’s Township History is also connected to California mining history, because every grave has a “timing connection” to the Bodie Mining District. 

~~~These names and dates, unique only to Bodie, tell the History of this gold mining district, on the map collectively called “the Bodie Mining District,” located on the Eastern Sierra in California.  Intertwined in the towns history are the individual graves of the  men who  physically labored, 1,200 feet below ground, in the shafts of the mines, and  who banded together in 1877 to establish the Bodie Miners’ Union labor organization. The BODIE MINERS’ UNION established Bodie as a “mining-town.” Organized, the Miners’ took the “mining-camp” to a California location of significance both innovation and enterprise.

~~~What remains today is only the scares of tunnel mining, abandoned machinery and forgotten graves. The Cemetery reclaimed by sage-brush, fenced to keep out the wandering cattle and covered in snow-depth. Only the Headstones and Marble Monuments make it a “place of notation” on the mountainside, above the old-town of decaying buildings.