San Bernardino Volunteers Launch Oct. 3 Historic Tour to Support Restoration of Deteriorating Pioneer Cemetery

Sinking headstones, fractured stone borders and leaning monuments are threatening the physical record of families buried at Pioneer Memorial Cemetery, where volunteers are organizing an Oct. 3 historical tour to support preservation efforts.

The tour will feature five pioneer families through descendants’ accounts and youth reenactments, including stories about the Earp family and the parents of the Ralphs grocery founders. It is the first event organized by a preservation committee that grew from four friends cleaning headstones into a project sponsored by the Rotary Club of San Bernardino and Arrowhead United Way.

Gates open at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, with the program beginning at 10 a.m. and concluding at noon at the cemetery, 211 E. Ninth St. Organizers request a $20 donation. Children under 10 are free.

For project director Jenon Anderson-Reise, one fallen monument illustrates the urgency. She calls it “the queen” because of its crownlike top. When the preservation effort began about 18 months ago, she said, it was standing. During a recent walkthrough with IECN, she showed where it had fallen.

Across the cemetery (which lacks an irrigation system), she pointed to missing monument tops, broken plot borders and markers that have sunk beneath the grass. She said lasting preservation will require addressing conditions around the stones, rather than repeatedly cleaning them only to watch mud and vegetation return. 

Anderson-Reise pointed to soft ground in several areas of the cemetery, explaining that burrowing gophers and ants have undermined the soil supporting grave markers and monuments.

While monument and headstone theft and vandalism has been documented by San Bernardino Police over the years, Anderson-Reise attributed some deterioration to age, uneven ground, burrowing pests and inconsistent watering. She cautioned that a broken or fallen monument does not establish how the damage occurred. 

“I don’t want to accuse somebody of something I haven’t seen,” she said.

That distinction matters to the project’s approach: Volunteers are trying to identify what needs attention and how to preserve it, while recognizing that the condition of individual monuments can have different explanations.

The effort began when Anderson-Reise and three friends visited the cemetery to trim vegetation, clean headstones and make repairs where they could. All are retired, she said, and her friends’ interest in genealogy helped bring them there.

After several visits, she realized the work required a broader preservation effort. A newly cleaned marker could soon return to its previous condition if it remained sunken or surrounded by unstable ground.

The group formed a committee and began meeting at the San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society in February 2025. City Parks and Recreation Director Vanessa Carder connected Anderson-Reise with Rotary President Tawnya Rhoades-Hensley. Rotary’s board approved sponsoring the project, and Anderson-Reise joined the club in August 2026, becoming its project director for the cemetery preservation effort.

Rhoades-Hensley said she readily agreed to help when approached, offering support and a willingness to champion the project.

“Once I get involved, I’m fully involved,” she said.

Saturday’s event will draw support from more than 50 volunteers. Participants include the preservation committee, Rotarians, Rotary youth members, the San Bernardino Elks’ Antlers youth group, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other community volunteers.

Docents will guide visitors from one pioneer scene to the next. Descendants will share their family histories, and young participants will perform short skits in settings designed to reflect the periods portrayed.

The program includes Elizabeth “Lizzy” Rowan, as one of San Bernardino’s first African American pioneers. Organizers also described presentations involving the Earp, Ralphs, Hunt and Seccombe families.

For the Ralphs story, Anderson-Reise said organizers are preparing a scene resembling an old store to explain the family’s connection to the grocery business. She clarified that the grocery founders are buried elsewhere; their parents are buried at Pioneer.

Anderson-Reise said Nick Cataldo of the San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society helped connect organizers with descendants participating in the event. She hopes the collaboration will encourage more people interested in history to join the preservation work.

Visitors will also receive information explaining symbols on older grave markers. During the walkthrough, Anderson-Reise pointed out fraternal emblems and other imagery that offer clues about the people memorialized there.

Rhoades-Hensley described Rotary Life, whose youth members will participate, as a leadership program with more than 40 years of history. Their role in the tour brings young volunteers into the effort to share and preserve local family stories.

The city is providing restrooms, hand sanitation stations, trash receptacles and chairs for the event, Anderson-Reise said. She also credited improvements at the cemetery, including the removal of dead trees and changes to maintenance vendors following meetings with city representatives in late 2025.

Longer-term work will require coordination beyond volunteer cleaning. Anderson-Reise said her group does not raise headstones and wants to work with the city before undertaking that kind of restoration. She also hopes to find a partner to use ground-penetrating radar to locate obscured markers and then arrange to have them raised.

Pioneer remains an operating cemetery, she said, with families continuing to visit loved ones. Her broader vision is to make it a living museum, linking preserved monuments with accessible accounts of the people they commemorate.

“You can come here, tap a tile and read about the history of that person and their family,” Anderson-Reise said.