“I love this place. It’s the first cemetery I visited in Placerville. That wooden marker leaning on the fence on the way in amazed me. And it’s still there. Right from the start I loved statuary grave markers and all the religious symbology on the headstones… clearly an undiagnosed taphophile. These days I love it because this is a what a normal, well-managed private cemetery should looks like. Note the flat graves over there, to make it easier to cut the grass. They cut the grass!” recounts Mike Roberts during the 2025 cemetery tour.
Many of the historic El Dorado County cemeteries are not orderly places. There is order in this universe.
This isn’t the first St Patrick’s Church Cemetery. It was behind the church on Sacramento Street… the final resting place for a century of Placerville’s Catholic faithful from 1851 through 1952.
In 1963 many of the graves were moved to the St Patrick’s Cemetery on Green Street in Placerville. The church needed space to expand. However, nearly 100 graves were not moved. The headstones were bulldozed, and those graves were covered over by the new church building. You might ask “Can they do that?”
Since it’s their cemetery, yes, they can. Apparently, this was done with the permission of the families they could find. Or perhaps these were the families they couldn’t find. Other than a few scathing letters to the editor, the action seems to have passed without much fuss. The Parish Priest, Father Cornelius O’Conner said at the time “We feel this is a dignified approach to the problem we had to face.”
A nice memorial on the east side of the church building commemorates the old cemetery and the parishioners still in it. It can be accessed by the Fisk Street entrance to the church.
St. Patrick Catholic Church Cemetery was part of the 2024/2025 “Lesser Known Placerville Cemeteries” tour led by Mike Roberts, Save the Graves.
