Sacramento City Cemetery: City of the Gold Rush Dead

Sacramento City Cemetery opened in eighteen forty-nine, the same year gold-seekers flooded the valley. It is the oldest existing cemetery in Sacramento. More than twenty-five thousand people are buried here, including three California governors, Mark Hopkins of the Central Pacific Railroad, and hundreds of Chinese laborers whose section was long segregated from the rest of the grounds.

Cholera and typhoid swept through Sacramento repeatedly in the eighteen fifties, and waves of unmarked graves from those epidemics fill the older sections. The cemetery fell into disrepair for decades before community volunteers launched a restoration campaign in the nineteen eighties. Today it functions as both an active burial ground and a walking history of early Sacramento.