Elbow Creek Cemetary destroyed... Some of Visalia's history is lost.

It may have been simple maintenance, turning under weeds that had grown high around old tombstones. But two people who live near Elbow Creek Cemetery have a different word for it: desecration.

The grounds of the 150-year-old cemetery north of Visalia looked like a newly disked field late Monday. Rocky Foster and Nathan Dotson watched as someone they said was from the Visalia Cemetery District plowed and scraped the four-acre site. Ground-level placards and grave markers were destroyed or covered with dirt, and some above-ground tombstones were missing.

Area residents have relatives buried at the cemetery, located on a dirt road north of Avenue 328 and east of Road 132.
Now they may not be able to find their burial plots, Foster said.
"Those poor people are going to be livid," he said.
They have good reason, Dotson said.
"The county has no records of who's buried where," he said.
Foster, a veterinarian who raises quarter horses and bucking bulls for rodeos, lives next door to the cemetery. He said he and Dotson confronted the worker as he was plowing the grounds.
Foster said he pleaded with the worker to stop and that a maintenance supervisor for the cemetery district showed up.
Foster said he argued with someone named "Ron" that cemeteries are "hallowed" sites protected by state law.
Foster and Dotson said they did not know the man's last name.
A woman who answered the phone at the Visalia Cemetery District offices in Visalia Tuesday said that the district maintains Elbow Creek Cemetery and has an employee named "Ron."
She said Dona Shores, district manager, is on vacation until next week. Messages left for "Ron" were not returned.
Foster said the district employee told him the ground was too "rough to mow."
He said he also was told that the district wanted to get rid of weeds ahead of the rainy season.
"But the reason the weeds were overgrown is because no one takes care of the place," Dotson said.
At one point, Foster said, the debate turned into a "hollering and screaming" match.
Dotson, who lives about a mile away from the cemetery, confirmed that the discussion got more than a little heated.
"It started to get ugly," Dotson said, "but I tried to calm everyone down."
Afterward, Dotson said, he found "hundreds of shards and pieces" of broken headstones and grave markers at the cemetery. The worker first plowed the field and then used a grader to level the ground, he said.
"All the stones were broken up pretty good," Dotson said.
Several headstones were piled in a heap, along with dirt and weeds and other debris, at one end of the field.
Foster said he salvaged some of the headstones and set them aside.
A lot of the above-ground tombstones were "knocked down and destroyed," Dotson said.
"But the prominent ones are still there," he said.
Foster said he has offered many times to mow the cemetery and otherwise care for the site. But he said the district always has rejected his offers.

Michael Miyamoto
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Elbow Creek Cemetery is just north of Avenue 328 and east of Road 132.


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I copied and pasted this directly from the Visalia Times Delta website visaliatimesdelta.com

Our County's founders were buried here. And someone disturbed their final resting place....

 

I think it is pretty damning when in an age where we CAN account for all of these graves, and can even identify quite a few, very few people bother!

I've read the story of the Pioneer Cemetary before, and in my opinion it is a perfect example of Public officials catering to land grabbing developers, hell-bent on making money and not giving a fat rats butt about how they gain those $$$!

I'd love to know what ever became of respect for our dead? Respect for the ones who came here, blazed the trail that created the environs in which we live? Respect for all those people accomplished.

I'm going out there later this week, to compare the photos I have here to what is left behind. Before I say much more, I NEED to know how much damamge was really done.