Oro Grande Cemetery

“Oro grande was a gold and silver boomtown when Victorville was still a ranch. When the minerals were scarce so were the people and everyone started migrating towards Vicorville. Oro Grande is the oldest cemetery in the county of San Bernardino. It goes back depending who you talk to. From 1852 or 1861 or 1865. I kind of like the 1865 date myself. All of the folks that are buried up here are Oro Grande residents and miners and cement workers and merchants and people from the town back in the day. The cemetery was closed by the Oro Grande foundation in 1958 because they were in the midst of unfortunately turning us over to the county. They closed it because they decided they didn’t have the funding to maintain the cemetery even though it's dirt. I do it, it's dirt.

 About 30 years ago the cemetery was vandalized and the people who did it took out the crosses, broke crosses, tossed crosses, put some crosses in upside down, broke all the stones they could manage to break. And as a community we all came up here and put it all back together and fixed it up. From that point I started keeping an eye on it and actually taking care of it. Then in 2010 the county finally, after years of asking and begging for some money for improvements and maintenance in the cemetery, they came up with a $40,000 grant of which we got a fence across the front and a block wall. That’s it. So the other $35,000 went into the general fund so that they could spend it elsewhere. That’s how they do it here. 

The cement company near here, the billion dollar corporation has been annexed into Victorville so we don’t receive any funding from that. And they don’t help the community because we are non-profit. So we are on our own, the whole town actually, there is no funding for Oro Grande. There's never been funding for the cemetery.