Saturday, December 10, 2011

Aurora Ghost Town (The Cemetery Cont.)

This area that is fenced in and just outside of it is called the recent or "new" cemetery. Most of the people interred here had some connection to the town beyond the boom years. Continuing from the last blog, I went through the entrance:Some of the tombstones or markers are broken or have been stolen. Some that were made of wood are long gone. There are a bunch that were solidly made like this for Mary and Henry Williams. They were natives of Ireland. who died in the early 1890's.This is Edwin Wood. He died in the late 1890's at the age of 50. His daughter Lurie Wood who died when she was six in the 1887.The following graves are some of the sad ones of which I am sure there were many more here . These graves were the children of Horace and Lizzie Marden. Hoddie Marden died in 1884. He was 18. The marker on the left is for James Marden. He was 7 years old and died of typhoid fever at Twin Lakes outside Bridgeport in 1865. As I mention in the video, I have probably walked by where he lived and died a great many times through my life since that is near the summer home. Horace did some lumbering there, and I have an idea where they would have lived. The following represents four children that died within ten days here. There was a diphtheria outbreak here in Aurora in 1878. Originally, there was a marker for each child's grave. I show a picture of it in the video. However, these days this marker has each name on each side of the marker. I kind of regret not taking pictures of each side now, but during the time I was more concerned about getting to another gravesite that will show up in a few blogs.

Just as an FYI, originally, I did not intend to do a video for most of the cemetery. I was only going to show a few gravesites on video. Since I already had an old camcorder video of most of the graves, I decided to quickly go through the cemetery with my HD cam and do quick indentations mostly for my own use. When putting together this series I changed my mind. So, to make up for the transitions of me moving from grave to grave, or if I did not like the way I moved the camera I inserted a few pictures at points. That is the why I moved around rather quickly with most of the graves you see in the video.
There are more recent internments. Some just go back to the 1980's or 1990's. For example, this one is for Clayton and Elsie Davis who died in 1987 and 1995. These more recent internments are of people that have some connection to the town.Anna, wife of J. G. Booker, was 27 years old when she died in 1896.There are more graves here, and I show some of the same and others in the video. The next two blogs will deal with the graves that are outside of this cemetery. They are part of the older section of the cemetery that was used during the boom years.

If you want to learn more about the Marden family and their tragedy then please get the following book:


A follow up book is a series of columns written for the Inyo Register by Horace Marden. Mrs. Lee adds essential annotations to the articles:

Lee, Peggy Knudsen. Tales of Aurora, Bodie, & Columbus: Written in 1915 & 1916 for the Inyo Register by Horace Marden (Crescenta: Mountain N' Air Books, 2010)

R.I.P. Aurora (Youtube Version)

R.I.P. Aurora (Vimeo Version)