No longer forgotten

Scratching a rake through the dry leaves and twigs on a wooded acre west of Sebastopol on Friday morning, Arden Lites uncovered a brown-stained marble slab nearly 150 years old.

It was the tombstone of Darius D. Martin, who died at age 19 on May 24, 1862, and was interred at Spring Hill Cemetery, an overgrown and long-neglected final resting place for more than 100 Sonoma County residents.

"We knew he was here," said Sue Zeni, an El Cerrito woman who came across the unmarked cemetery three years ago and has methodically documented its occupants.

There should be four more members of the pioneer Camron family nearby, Zeni said, and their gravestones may lie just inches below the green vinca and decaying leaves that blanket the burial ground just off Bodega Highway.

"It's really exciting," said Lites, who lives in nearby Freestone, describing her find.

It was Lites' first time out with a band of volunteers who've been restoring Spring Hill in monthly work details since October, when Sonoma County confirmed its ownership of the site and committed park maintenance crews to help with the cleanup.

"I'm just amazed at how much they've done," said Carmen Finley, a Santa Rosa resident who has nine ancestors in a plot at Spring Hill.

Finley, who discovered the cemetery when she undertook genealogical research on her family in the 1980s, said she met one of them, her bearded great uncle John J. Finley, who died in 1931. "I remember him as Santa Claus," said Finley, a retired educator.

The volunteers "find new stuff" with every visit, said Zeni, a descendent of both the Finley and McReynolds families.

Patriarch James Madison McReynolds, who came by wagon train from Missouri to California in 1852, buried his first wife, Elizabeth, on a corner of his 160-acre Green Valley farm the following year. In the mid-19th century, it was common for ranchers to bury their relatives at home, and Spring Hill ultimately received about 110 people, the most recent in 1996.

Untended for decades, the cemetery is overgrown and littered with fallen trees and laced with dirt pathways leading to clusters of gravestones, some standing and others fallen and broken.

Larrick McDowell, who moved onto an adjacent property last year, said the place seemed so forlorn he planned to hire workers to clean it up. "It just broke our hearts," McDowell said.

He was thrilled to see Zeni's group tackle the job instead. "It looks 100 percent better now," McDowell said. "It's incredible."

The volunteers have uncovered 16 headstones and footstones, and on Friday filled their 13th county parks dump truck with debris.

There's still plenty to be done, with remnants of 65 burials identified and at least 40 more to be found, Zeni said. Weatherworn tombstones like Darius Martin's can be treated and restored to bare white marble; shattered monuments can be repaired if money is available.

About a dozen oaks, withered victims of sudden oak death, must be removed. All the wood and debris will be hauled to the dump because it is assumed to be infected with the oak pathogen, said Glen King, a parks maintenance worker.

Dick Giberti spent the morning rebuilding a wooden enclosure around the Zilhart family plot, using some of the square nails he retrieved from the site.

"I don't even know who they are," said Giberti, who volunteers because his wife belongs to the West County Historical Society.

You can reach Staff Writer

Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy. kovner@pressdemocrat.com.