Sacramento's oldest existing cemetery opens in front of you at 1000 Broadway, at 10th Street. This is the oldest existing cemetery in Sacramento, laid out to resemble a Victorian garden and planted with roses said to be among the finest in California. Imagine the grounds as a deliberate landscape: where the land falls away, brick or concrete retaining walls lift terraces into level beds, an attempt to tame the slope into something orderly and comforting.
In 1849 John Augustus Sutter, Jr. donated 10 acres to the city for this purpose, and the cemetery began to collect the city’s stories. Nearby, the earlier New Helvetia Cemetery—founded about 1845—was prone to flooding, and starting as early as 1850 some of those earlier burials were reinterred here. The city also bears a darker memory: in 1850 some 600 victims of the cholera epidemic were buried in mass graves in this cemetery, while another 800 were interred in mass graves at New Helvetia.
Notice the terraces, the roses, and the rows of weathered stones marking this ground's Victorian design and hard history.