By james art The Redlands Area Historical Society is offering its 15th annual Hillside Memorial Park Walking Tour of Redlands on Saturday, October 26. The tour starts at 15:30 near the Egyptian Mausoleum of the cemetery and will end before sunset. The cemetery is at 1540 Alessandro Road.
Tom Atchley, vice president of the Redlands Area Historical Society, will lead the tour, assisted by Ron Running, according to a news release.
The tour fee is $10 for historical society members and $15 for non-members, payable at the start of the tour.
Atchley will talk about some of the people who have been important in Redlands history as participants visit the gravestones of those people. The tour does not cover a great distance, but there are many uneven surfaces and moderate hills in the cemetery.
Hillside Memorial Park began in 1886 when Myron Crafts, friend and mentor of Redlands founders Edward Judson and Frank Brown, died.
Judson and Brown did not include a cemetery on their preliminary map of Redlands in 1881, according to a news release. But Crafts’ death led to the purchase of 23.47 acres by the Southern Pacific Railroad Land Co.
Judson and Brown then donated the site to the Hillside Cemetery Association, which consisted of board members John W. Edwards, Edward G. Judson, Charles Putnam, AL Park, Carl S. Wells, and James S. Edwards.
The first person buried in the new cemetery was Charles Gauthier, a Civil War veteran and resident of what later became Smiley Heights, followed by Crafts.
The City of Redlands took over the cemetery in 1918.
The cemetery’s 1928 Egyptian mausoleum is a reminder of Redlanders’ fascination with the discovery of King Tutan’s tomb in Egypt in the 1920s, according to the news release.
In the 1930s the Works Progress Administration spent $25,000 on 35,000 cubic feet of stone walls, curbs and retaining walls, and in 1938 the WPA had 141 men build the retaining wall along Alessandro Road, spending about $56,000 for this wall.
A 1937 article in the Redlands Daily Facts listed 151 Civil War veterans, 36 Spanish-American War veterans, and 69 World War I burials at Hillside Memorial Park.
Today, Hillside Memorial Park is one of the few city-operated cemeteries in California, according to the news release.