History runs deep at Angels Camp church

Look at the front yard of the Union Congregational Church in Angels Camp and you might think they’ve chosen some rather ghoulish landscaping.

Along the main path, and dotting the south lawn, stand more than half a dozen engraved marble and granite slabs. Gravestones.
  

But there is no Halloween-loving garden architect at work here. The century-plus-old church, it turns out, is built atop a graveyard.

The long-hidden headstones, discovered 12 years ago when the building was raised to smooth a buckled floor and replace its rock-pile foundation, are now a visible legacy of the lax laws of the post-Gold Rush years.

The situation is far from unique in Calaveras County.

“There are people buried all over the place,” from backyards to cow pastures, says Judith Marvin, a county historian.

Nor is the gravestones’ fate unusual.

Wooden tombstones were frequently victims of far worse indignities than being plowed under for a church.

“Cows knock them over, they get burned in fires, all kinds of things,” Marvin said.

The foreman of the former Brownsville ranch on Pennsylvania Gulch Road “ripped up all the wooden tombstones and threw them in the creek so there would be more room for his cattle to graze,” Marvin said.

By that measure, or even a stricter one, the Union Congregational Church’s markers have been treated well.

Still easily readable, they range from stark modesty — a foot-high rounded marble slab marked simply, “W.H.” — to grandeur — a two-tiered, pyramid-esque marker that towers more than 6-feet tall. The latter, dated 1856, is visible in a photo the Rev. Lloyd Schneider believes was taken shortly after the church opened its doors in 1905, suggesting its position either saved it from being plowed under or it was relocated.

Perhaps the most intriguing headstone is a white marble slab of a man who died Aug. 26, 1868, at age 56. His name? “Col. Isaac Bird Gore, born in Tennessee.”

“He’s got to be a relative of the former Vice President,” said Schneider, referring to Al Gore, whose family has deep roots in Tennessee.

Regardless of his blood ties, the late Col. Gore was likely one of the parish’s leading members, a church VIP of some sort, said ex-mayor and Angels Camp historian Tad Folendorf.

“Room was so limited that most everybody is up at the cemetery in Altaville,” he said.

Gore was also likely one of the last people buried in the cemetery. 

As mines in Angels Camp and elsewhere in California started to close down in the late 1860s, throwing once-thriving communities into stagnation, an ecclesiastical council gathered to assure their scarce resources were spread effectively across California, according to Schneider.

In Angels Camp, the Union Congregational Church was tasked with taking over from the Methodists, Schneider says. In 1869, the year after Gore’s death, the parish that exists today was formed. (It is now part of the United Church of Christ.)

Around this time, the cemetery was foreclosed on. Schneider speculates that the city’s declining fortunes drove its owners into bankruptcy. He’s still trying to track down hard proof.

For the first few decades of its existence, the parish held its services in the former Methodist church building, which was located on the rear of the two lots on which the church’s buildings sit today.

Then, in 1904, it received an expansion grant of $455.13 from the national headquarters.

They had 53 West Africans to thank for the windfall — the money was left over from the legal defense fund gathered for the men and women taken illegally as slaves by the cargo schooner La Amistad, as depicted in the 1997 Steven Spielberg movie, “Amistad.”

The parish decided, for reasons still not fully understood, to build atop the foreclosed cemetery.

While Schneider has heard rumors that the bones — none of which were uncovered in the church’s past excavations — were moved to another site, he doesn’t believe it.

Moving tons of rock and other material was a staple of life in the mining years, and it makes no sense to Schneider that anyone would go to the trouble of moving the bones but leave the headstones. Nor does their presence bother him.

“People have been on this planet a million, two million years,” he said. “There’s probably bones all around us all the time.

“It creeps some people. To me, we’re just the current inhabitants. The cycle of life includes death and burial. It’s natural.”