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Saratoga Stereopticon
Rumors of need are probably exaggerated
By Willys Peck
Although I am a card-carrying senior citizen, I'd like to think I haven't pushed the envelope too far age-wise. But when this particular envelope came back addressed to me from the Los Gatos Memorial Park, containing illustrated cemetery hype, I couldn't help wondering if somebody was trying to tell me something. It is, to be sure, an especially attractive cemetery, and the material they sent has information on things like two burial plots for the price of one, cryptic statements about niches (that's a joke, son), and a veteran discount plan. Also, I can't quarrel with the advisability of planning these things ahead of time. It's just that lengthening shadows seem to add a new dimension.
I can't think of Los Gatos Memorial Park, though, without remembering the San Jose City Council meeting I covered as a reporter for the Mercury (before the News was added), when what was then called Los Gatos Cemetery was annexed by San Jose. I would have given anything to have led off my story for the next day's paper with something like, "Some people who may have said they wouldn't be caught dead having a San Jose address are in for a disappointment." Of course this kind of thing wouldn't have gotten past the city editor, and the closest I got to levity was mentioning that the cemetery was annexed as uninhabited territory.
This was in San Jose's "manifest destiny" era, when, to mangle a metaphor, the city was annexing everything that wasn't nailed down. It was this westward annexation drive by San Jose that prompted the incorporation of the city of Campbell in 1952, Cupertino in 1955 and Saratoga in 1956.
Saratoga never had to worry about outside municipal encroachment on its burial ground. Where Los Gatos had incorporated in 1887 with 1 square mile of area encompassing the present downtown, and Los Gatos Cemetery was established two years later about 3 1/2 miles outside town on the Almaden Road, Madronia Cemetry got its start quite near the incipient settlement of McCartysville, later Saratoga.
The only territorial issue involving the cemetery came about because the first burials, starting about 1854, were thought to be on government land. However, the owners of the Quito Land Grant--a deed issued by the Mexican governor of the Province of California in 1841 and confirmed by the U.S. government in 1857, after the Mexican War--claimed that the burial ground was on their land. It turned out they were right. The dispute was settled when Don Jose Ramon Arguello, principal owner of the Quito grant, dedicated slightly more than two acres for community use as a cemetery.
In 1863, the Madronia Cemetery Association was formed, at a time when the town's official name was McCartysville. In his pamphlet, "Saratoga's Oldest Institution--Madronia Cemetery," prepared for the Saratoga Historical Foundation in 1961, Charles N. Cunningham noted that the cemetery trustees did not use the town's name for the district, choosing instead the name of the tree that predominated in that area. Cunningham pointed out that by inserting an "i" in the Spanish madrona, the trustees were creating a word that was neither Spanish nor English. But the Spanish spelling has a horizontal mark called a tilde over the "n," giving it a "ny" sound, and the added "i" preserves the pronunciation, if not the spelling.
The association went through 64 years of what Cunningham described as "hand-to-mouth" existence, levying charges that covered only the most basic maintenance and leaving maintenance of individual plots up to the families, who didn't always perform it as needed. It wasn't until 1927 that the association trustees moved to take advantage of legislation passed in 1926 authorizing the creation of tax-supported cemetery districts.
The area chosen for circulation of petitions was the Saratoga Union School District, in which 95 percent of the voters agreed to the formation of a cemetery district. The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors granted the petition on Aug. 1, 1927, and appointed the three-member board of trustees, later increased to five.
Changes that have taken place over the years include the acquisition of four additional parcels of land and the expansion of the Saratoga Cemetery District to include those segments of the cities of Saratoga and Monte Sereno not already in the Saratoga Union School District. Madronia Cemetery now encompasses 10 acres, with another two acres soon to be added.
Twenty years ago, a young man working on a community service project for his Eagle Scout badge undertook the task of compiling a 157-page book listing the names and dates on all the grave markers in Madronia. In listing names on the Peck family stone, which include birth and death dates of my parents and brother, as well as my birth date, he enhanced my reference with the annotation, "Probably still living."
Have you got that, Los Gatos Memorial Park? Probably still living.
Don't wait up.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
