Santa Monica Canyon Civic Association

An Eighth Grader Discovers A Santa Monica Canyon Graveyard

Student Discovers Canyon Roots

Picture yourself in a nice, quiet, upper-middle class neighborhood adjacent to Santa Monica. There are beautiful houses and trees, kind neighbors, friendly pets, and a cemetery in the middle of the block.

I’ve lived on San Lorenzo Street almost all my life and from an early age I’d heard rumors about people being buried behind the ivy covered fence down the street, but it wasn’t until I actually visited the place that I believed it. I was with my mom, on a nice, sunny, peaceful day. We were walking our dog Maddy and she told me the story of the Marquez family, who founded Santa Monica Canyon.

I had heard the story before but never seen the spot, so when she offered to show me I eagerly agreed. We snuck through a hole in the fence where the ivy was dying. We treaded through the small lot filled with odds and ends, aged avocado trees and a rusty old wagon wheel and came to a crumbling adobe wall with an arched doorway in it.

Through it was a clearing in which there was a statue of a saint and a split headstone with two names inscribed on it: “Michaela and Pasqual Marquez, Pasqual was born here and now he rests.”

After I saw the tombstone, I was incredibly motivated to find the story behind it. As it turns out, Michaela and Pasqual Marquez were very important people in the Santa Monica area. They, along with other members of the Marquez family, founded the San Monica Canyon community. Though Pasqual and Michaela’s gravestones are the only ones still there, they are not the only people buried in the cemetery.

The story goes that on New Year Eve, 1910, Maria Donicia Valdez held a party in her home in West Los Angeles. Unfortunately, everyone at that party, except a little baby, died of botulism from eating the home-canned peaches that were served at the party. They were all buried in the cemetery, but their gravestones are not standing. Among others buried at the Marquez Cemetery are Indian servants, friends of the Marquez family and the son of the famous cowboy Kit Carson and his dog. I was blown away to discover these little known facts and now had a hunger for more information about this place.

Santa Monica Canyon was “started” in 1839 when the Mexican government granted Francisco Marquez and Ysidro Reyes a parcel of land called, Rancho Boca De Santa Monica. The Canyon quickly became a place where people from Los Angeles came to escape from the bustle of the city. It was filled with vast open hills and plant life, with the occasional dirt road and ranches dotting the countryside. Springs and babbling brooks wove through the mesa into the vast ocean at the mouth of the canyon. Francisco married Roque Venezuela in 1834. Their house was located on the mesa now known as San Lorenzo Street, where years later the Marquez cemetery would be built, the street from which I now write. Canyon school, now an incredibly important part of the canyon, was started in 1894 and moved to its present site (on Channel Rd.) in 1912.

The Marquez Cemetery was just a simple plot of land littered sparsely with wooden crosses and headstones. The Canyon was discovered in the 1920s and ‘30s by a group of European writers, artists, and celebrities, and it began to blossom into what it is today.

I re-visited the Cemetery yesterday, and from the outside it looked the same. I squeezed through the same hole in the same rotting fence. I walked through the same adobe-stucco gateway, running my hands on the eerily cool iron of the small alcove, and saw the same clearing littered with orange and Jacaranda trees. I crunched on the same dead leaves that blanketed the soft earth, and paused at the same place where I felt the cold marble of the headstone once again. But this time I felt different. In contrast with my first visit, my mind was not simply filled with curiosity and awe, but with wisdom and knowledge. I knew what the inscription on the gravestone meant. I knew what used to lie in that cool alcove. I did not need to ask whose names were on the gravestone or what their story was.

When I paused in the archway, running my hands on the prickly stucco, I knew it had once been adobe. I realized that this place, which half the people on my block still don’t even know about, holds some of the people without whom there would be no Santa Monica Canyon. I also wondered why nobody knew about this place. So why do so few people know of this place? Is it just that nobody has heard of it, or that nobody cares? How could they not care about one of Los Angeles’ oldest cemeteries being next to their swimming pool? Knowing what I now know, I can no longer take for granted the history I live on. Especially since I’m walking not just on the soles of my feet.

In the 8th grade at the Crossroads Middle School, Willa Nasatir wrote this
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