Event

Mt Hope Cemetery Tour

Join historian Alex Bevil as he evokes the storied past of this historic cemetery, highlighting history, mysteries, and scandals involving those who make Mount Hope their final resting place.

In 1871 a citizen committee lead by Alonzo Horton established Mount Hope Cemetery as the new, municipal cemetery for San Diego. Horton, who is widely regarded as the father of modern San Diego, was buried there in 1909. In addition to Horton, a few of the prominent citizens and notorious personalities of early San Diego whose graves you will see are: San Diego pioneer and one-time mayor Matthew Sherman; community leader, department store owner and philanthropist George Marston; prominent merchant and businessman Thomas Whaley (of Whaley House fame) and his family; pioneering horticulturist Kate Sessions; African-American pioneer Nate Harrison; builder of the Hotel del Coronado, Elisha Babcock, and the unfortunate young lady who allegedly haunts the hotel, Kate Morgan; and crime novelist Raymond Chandler.

Another fascinating stop along the tour that you are not likely to find anywhere else is what archaeologist Seth Mallios calls "a mass grave for gravestones." The headstones were moved from Calvary Cemetery in Mission Hills when it closed in the 1960s and thrown into a ravine behind Mount Hope Cemetery. When outraged trolley passengers who noticed the headstones as they rode by complained, the stones were buried in a mass grave.

Tour guide Alex Bevil is Californian State Parks historian and has published several award-winning articles in the Journal of San Diego History focusing on San Diego's architectural and military history, and contributed a chapter on local architect Emmor Brooke Weaver in Toward a Simpler Way of Life: The Arts and Crafts Architects of California, 1997. A past SOHO board member and recipient of two People In Preservation Awards, he has taught historic preservation classes at the San Diego NewSchool of Architecture and Design, and has organized and led several SOHO historic neighborhood tours in San Diego and downtown Los Angeles.