The Bodie Church and the Cemetery: What Gets Preserved and Why

Walk to the edge of Bodie and follow the path uphill to the cemetery. It tells you something the rest of the town does not.

The cemetery on the hill above Bodie is one of the most intact nineteenth-century mining-town cemeteries in California. The headstones are still there, many of them legible, recording names, dates, and occasional epitaphs. They record the deaths of families, of children, of men who had names and connections and someone who thought to carve their information into stone.

The Chinese workers who made up a significant portion of Bodie's labor force at the mining peak are largely absent from this record. The women of the town's red-light district are largely absent. The miners who died in the shafts, in blasting accidents or from the slow damage of underground work, are underrepresented. The stone record in every cemetery is a record of who was considered worth the cost of a stone, and at Bodie, as everywhere, that cost sorted by wealth, connection, and social standing.

The Methodist church at the western end of town stands in better condition than most of Bodie's structures, for the same reason: it had an institution behind it. The schoolhouse is similarly intact. These were the buildings the town's prominent families fought to preserve because they represented what the town wanted to say about itself: that it was not only a place of violence and vice, but also a place of faith and education.

Bodie was both of those things. The cemetery and the church record one version. The Chinatown site to the east, with no marker at all, holds the other version.

Both are true. Only one is still visible.