Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum - El Campo Santo Cemetery

El Campo Santo Cemetery

The family cemetery, El Campo Santo, was established in the 1850s. The earliest documented date is the burial of founder William Workman's brother, David, in November 1855. A year later, artist Henry Miller, touring California to visit and sketch the Spanish and Mexican-era Roman Catholic missions, stayed at the Workman House and prepared sketches for a chapel contemplated by Workman. On 30 May 1857, the cornerstone to St. Nicholas' Chapel (named in honor of Workman's wife, Nicolasa Urioste de Valencia) was laid and blessed by Bishop Thaddeus Amat. Construction of the Gothic Revival structure, which measured 24' x 48' and featured gilt ceiligns and stained glass windows, was completed by the early 1860s. The cemetery was used exclusively as a private burial ground for Workman and Temple family members and friends and masses were regularly heard, presumably by a priest visiting from Mission San Gabriel, at the chapel.

After the property, reduced from 24,000 to 75 acres (300,000 m2) after the family's bank failed in 1876, was lost by the family in 1900, the chapel was said to have burned and was razed, as were three of the original brick enclosure walls. Numerous gravestones were removed and the site desecrated. A lawsuit by Walter Temple, Workman's grandson, in 1907 halted the destruction, but the cemetery languished for a decade until Temple, newly enriched with oil revenue from his Montebello ranch, bought the ranch and cemetery. From 1919 to 1921, Temple's first priority on the ranch was the renovation of El Campo Santo and the building of a mausoleum, designed by the architectural firm of Garstang and Rea, on the site of the chapel. The reopening of the cemetery took place in April 1921, at which time the remains of the last governor of Alta California, Pío Pico, and his wife, Ygnacia Alvarado, were placed in the mausoleum. It also contains the remains of other prominent pioneer families. The Workman Home And Family Cemetery are designated California Historical Landmark No. 874.

The cemetery remained in use during the occupancy of the Temple family in the 1920s and during that of the Brown family from 1940 to 1981. In recent years there have been three burials. Walter P. Temple was relocated to the site in 2002 from Mission San Gabriel, where he was buried in 1938 after the cemetery's owner, California Bank, refused the Temples' request to have him buried there. Temple's son, Walter, Jr., the last member of the family to have lived at the Homestead, and daughter-in-law, Nellie Didier, were buried in the cemetery in 1998. A spot is reserved for their daughter, after which the cemetery will cease being in active use.