Added to the National Register of Historic Places on November 20, 1974

El Campo Santo is one of the earliest private family cemeteries in Southern California. Constructed in the 1850s by settler William Workman, the cemetery’s history parallels the changing fortunes of the Workman and Temple families over 175 years. It’s a reminder that while burial grounds are intended to house the dead, they also tell us a lot about the stories and priorities of the living. 

El Campo Santo is a simple rectangular burial ground, just under an acre in size and enclosed on all four sides by a low brick wall. Inside the entry gate is a Greek-style mausoleum from the 1920s housing the remains of many of the Workman family and their closest relatives and friends. Beyond that is an inner court, surrounded by an intricate cast-iron gate believed to date to the mid-19th century, where more family members are laid to rest. In the outer court are gravestones and markers for some of the families’ servants, workers and others.

Today, the Homestead Museum compound where El Campo Santo is situated is surrounded by warehouses and industrial parks. This is the City of Industry after all, a city where employees outnumber permanent residents by a factor of 253:1. Back in the mid-19th century though, this was rural ranchland, dotted with just a couple adobe homes and outbuildings. 

The Arrival of the Workmans

William Workman came to California in 1841, on the same wagon train as his friend and business associate John Rowland (whose mansion is also on the National Register). Workman had spent 15 years as a shop owner, whiskey distiller and fur trapper in New Mexico, still under Mexican rule at the time. He married a Taos native named Nicolasa Urioste, became a Mexican citizen, and converted to Catholicism in the late 1820s. But by the late 1830s, Workman & Rowland had gotten dunked into some political hot water as they navigated power struggles between the Mexican government, New Mexican rebels, and the newly established Republic of Texas. So in September of 1841, they packed their wagons with furniture, serapes and goods for the road, and began the two-month, 1200-mile journey west to California. They were accompanied by another 60-odd travelers, including the British settler Michael White (he of the Michael White Adobe in San Marino), and the future LA mayor Benjamin D. Wilson, namesake of Mount Wilson.

Soon after arriving in the Southland, John Rowland roadtripped up to Monterey to petition the Mexican governor Juan Bautista Alvarado for around ~18,000 acres of land known as Rancho La Puente.

This was land formerly owned by Mission San Gabriel Arcángel before the missions were secularized. For centuries before that it was stewarded by the Tongva-Gabrieleño people. Some of them lived in the village of Awig-na, a sizable settlement located right around where La Puente High School is today, though some place it closer to where El Campo Santo sits. It might even have been in both locations, depending on flooding patterns of the nearby San José Creek.

Despite protestations by Mission clergy and officials from San Gabriel, Governor Alvarado issued the title to Rancho La Puente to John Rowland in 1842, though the size and boundaries of the grant would be disputed for many years. While Rowland was gone collecting the rest of his family in New Mexico, Workman put up a small shanty where he and his family lived, while they built the earliest portion of the adobe house that you can visit today. At this point, only Rowland’s name was on the title to Rancho La Puente.

1845 was a big year for the Workman family. Governor Pío Pico formally added William Workman to the title for Rancho La Puente, as a thank you gift for supporting him in his battle against governor Micholterena, which resulted in Pico’s ascent to the governor’s throne. Pico soon enlarged Rowland & Workman’s holdings to 48,790 acres, adding in both Mission San Gabriel Arcángel (as a co-grant to Workman and another rancher, Hugo Reid) and Alcatraz Island.

Also in 1845, William and Nicolasa’s daughter Antonia Margarita married Francis Pliny Fisk (FPF) Temple, uniting two of LA’s most prominent Anglo-American families (read more about the Temples in my Rancho Los Cerritos visit). That marriage is often called the first in Los Angeles between two people with non-Spanish last names.

The Cemetery Gates

The Workmans established a successful cattle ranch, selling hides and tallow that they’d ship up the coast and as far as South America, via the port at San Pedro. That business shifted into overdrive after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. Thousands of miners and prospectors flowed into California during the Gold Rush, and they were all hungry for red meat. Where beef had once been considered a byproduct of the cattle industry, it was now its centerpiece for many of the big ranching operations in the Southland. The Workman family got rich.

El Campo Santo Cemetery was created in the early 1850s as a private family burial ground. While records are scarce for the cemetery’s earliest years, we know that the first family member to be buried at El Campo Santo was William’s brother David Workman, who died as a direct result of the cattle trade. 

David had arrived in Los Angeles with his wife and three sons in 1854. The following summer he was overseeing the transfer of a herd of Workman cows to a buyer in the mining camps up north. Somewhere outside of Stockton, David took a mule to find a heifer that had gone missing. He never returned to camp. The next day his vaqueros went looking for him, and found his body at the bottom of a 200-foot cliff. When David Workman’s corpse arrived in Los Angeles a couple months later, he was given full Masonic rites, in a ceremony described “as one of more than ordinary grandeur” by the Los Angeles Star.

The 1850s were a time of huge change in California. California’s admission to the US in the fall of 1850 brought in new political, legal and economic models that would upend the lives of many of the Californio families from the rancho era, the Workmans and Temples included.  

In the meantime, the two families enjoyed a phenomenally successful decade. To augment the beef trade bonanza, they expanded into agriculture, with ten acres of wine grapes and fruit orchards planted in the mid-1850s. Their land holdings grew when Workman acquired Rancho La Merced in 1850; he split it between his son-in-law FPF Temple and a former ranch foreman, Juan Matias Sanchez. FPF also owned butcher shops and slaughterhouses in Tuolumne County that likely processed the Workman cattle coming from Rancho La Puente. 

As the Workman and Temple families’ business grew, so did El Campo Santo. Artist Henry Miller, known for his mid-19th century drawings of the missions,  designed a brick chapel for the cemetery in the late 1850s as a place of worship for the Workman family’s neighbors and the local Native Americans they employed on the ranch. In 1860 the agriculturalist John Quincy Adams Warren wrote the most detailed account of the chapel that we’ve got, describing its stained glass windows and gilded ceiling and writing that “everything about the place evinces good taste and liberality.” The chapel was named St. Nicholas, in honor of Nicolasa Workman, and in 1857 its cornerstone was blessed by Bishop Thaddeus Amat, the first Bishop of the Diocese of Monterey-Los Angeles. 

Rise and Fall of a Patriarch

The golden days of the Southern California cattle industry ended in the early 1860s. It was already waning after the end of the Gold Rush and competition from midwestern and Texan ranchers. But then a month of heavy rains beginning on Christmas Eve 1861 led to destructive flooding, followed by two years of drought that killed off many SoCal cattle due to starvation. While William Workman’s livestock wasn’t hit nearly as hard as some other ranchers’, raising cattle became far less profitable as the 1860s dragged on, and the California economy changed.

The Workman-Temple clan weathered the loss of that income stream by diversifying. They expanded their agricultural holdings to include wheat, cotton, tobacco, sugar-cane and hops. And in the late 1860s William Workman and FPF Temple entered into banking, right as Los Angeles was undergoing a big wave of immigration and business development post-Civil War. 

FPF Temple, along with his father-in-law as a silent partner, formed the Workman & Temple Bank in 1871 after an earlier partnership with LA’s first banker Isaias W. Hellman had fallen apart. Over the next few years they’d invest in a staggering range of projects – from oil refining to water and railroad infrastructure, from real estate subdivisions to new construction downtown, from wharf-building at the port in San Pedro to the emerging insurance industry. Temple was even co-owner of the Los Angeles Herald and its competitor, the Los Angeles Express, for a spell. 

But the heady days of major financial moves came to an end in 1875, when a financial panic took hold of California, prompted by the closure of the Bank of California. Faced with a swarm of depositors looking to withdraw their money, Workman & Temple were forced to close their bank for nearly three months. To reopen, Temple arranged a loan from Elias “Lucky” Baldwin, and put up the Workman family ranch as collateral. Baldwin’s infusion of cash wasn’t enough to keep the bank afloat. After just five weeks back open, Workman & Temple Bank closed for good on January 13, 1876. 

In the ensuing months it became clear that the bank couldn’t pay back its remaining creditors (including the City of Los Angeles, which lost $23,000 in the bank’s failure). FPF declared bankruptcy and Workman lost the homestead to Lucky Baldwin, though it would be another few years before the foreclosure proceedings were complete. On the morning of May 17, 1876, one of Baldwin’s agents visited the Workman home to work out the details. Later that day William Workman shot himself in the head. The Los Angeles Herald reported that Workman’s suicide “cast a gloom of sorrow over the entire valley.”

William Workman was buried three days later in the inner court of El Campo Santo, near the grave of his old friend John Rowland, who had died in 1873 and had a large grave marker installed in the cemetery in 1875. Workman was buried with full Masonic honors, just like his brother David 21 years prior, and sent off by an estimated crowd of 200 mourners. 

Desecration

In 1880, a year after the foreclosure was finalized, Lucky Baldwin sold back the Workman homestead and 75 acres of Rancho La Puente to Francis Workman Temple, grandson of William Workman and son of FPF Temple, for $5000. Francis had lived at the homestead between his grandfather’s suicide and the Baldwin foreclosure. Now reunited with his family’s property, Francis ran a wine-making and brandy operation there, and grew walnuts and fruits.

The late 19th century also saw El Campo Santo welcome many new family members to its grounds. FPF Temple died in 1880, and Francis followed in 1888. Then in early 1892, FPF’s widow Antonia Margarita, her mother Nicolasa and son Thomas W. Temple all died within three weeks of each other, due to complications from the flu. They were all buried in the Workman family cemetery.

By the turn of the century though the Workman-Temple family had once again lost their homestead on the old Rancho La Puente to a bad mortgage decision, and it went through a succession of new owners. One of them, an Anaheim settler named Lafayette F. Lewis, decided to demolish the chapel and cemetery in 1903, to make space for barley fields and to let his livestock graze. Many of the headstones were ripped out, making it nearly impossible to pinpoint the locations of the people buried there over the years. 

According to Lewis, the chapel had partially burned down that year, so he took the opportunity to knock down the rest of it, plus three of the cemetery’s outer walls, and sell the remaining good bricks to builders in El Monte. Supposedly, he put up a sign before the desecration began.

Any person or persons having dead relatives or friends in this graveyard will kindly remove same at once, as the owner desires to plant barley here.

-Sign put up by Lafayette F. Lewis, quoted in Los Angeles Herald on December 5, 1905

Walter P. Temple, the 10th child of FPF and Antonia Margarita, brought a civil suit against Lewis over the desecration in 1906. The court agreed with Temple, arguing that the family’s decades of use meant that Lewis had no standing to destroy the cemetery, despite his ownership of it. The judge ordered Lewis to restore the walls or pay someone else to do it. Instead, he sold the entire homestead for $30,000 to a pair of Pasadenans unrelated to the family. The one positive to come out of this whole debacle? We know what El Campo Santo looked like in the early 1900s, because photos were submitted in court as evidence of Lewis’s desecration. 

The Cemetery’s Revival 

Then came a remarkable turnaround. In 1914, Walter P. Temple’s nine-year-old son Thomas found evidence of oil in a puddle on their property in Montebello Hills. The family leased out the land to Standard Oil for drilling, which was soon earning them $2,000 per day – more than enough to purchase the 75-acre Workman homestead and cemetery back from the two Pasadenans in November of 1917, for $40,000.

One of the first things that Walter did after he brought the homestead back under family ownership was to revitalize the cemetery. The three long-gone brick walls were replaced with pipe fencing; new concrete walkways were poured; new landscaping was added, including the heart-shaped planter that still greets you as you enter the cemetery today, and new headstones were created to replace those that had been removed. Where the identity of the deceased wasn’t known, they placed a simple marker stating “At Rest.” 

The biggest improvement to El Campo Santo was a new mausoleum where the old chapel once stood. The firm of Garstang and Rea designed a small Greek revival “temple” (perhaps a play on the family name?), with 24 crypts faced in marble, and “Walter P. Temple Memorial” inscribed across the entrance, despite the fact that Walter was very much alive and well at the time of its construction. 

The new memorial was dedicated in 1921 by Roman Catholic Bishop John J. Cantwell, in the same spot where his predecessor Bishop Amat had blessed the old St. Nicholas chapel, 64 years earlier. Inside, many of the dead Workman and Temple ancestors were re-interred in marble crypts, including William Workman and his wife Nicolasa, David Workman, and FPF and Antonia Margarita Temple.

Walter P. Temple also arranged to have William Workman’s old friend Pío Pico and his wife Maria Ygnacia moved to the new mausoleum from the old Calvary Cemetery, which was about to be demolished to make way for Cathedral High School. A year after the dedication, Walter’s wife Laura died of cancer, and she was laid to rest in the mausoleum, too; his brother John, who owned the homestead in the late 1800s, was interred there in 1926. A mother and son of the prominent Yorba/Palomares families were buried in the outer court in the ’20s as well.

The Temple family enjoyed a good few years of prosperity in the early 1920s. Walter busied himself with real estate, building a movie theater and several mid-rise office buildings in downtown Alhambra. He invested in construction projects in LA, San Pedro and all over the San Gabriel Valley. He founded the town of Temple in 1923, now known as Temple City. Back at the homestead, the family built La Casa Nueva, a gorgeous 26-room Spanish colonial home festooned in finely-carved wood, fountains and stained glass. It’s a stunning building, separately listed on the National Register.

But as we’ve come to expect in this family’s cyclical story of triumph and downfall, Walter P. Temple’s financial ambitions got the best of him. By the late ‘20s he found himself overextended, and was forced to take out a mortgage on the homestead in exchange for a loan from Farmers and Merchants Bank. The stock market crashed just days before the mortgage was due in late 1929. In 1930 the Temples had left their home for the last time, and by 1932 it was no longer theirs. Walter died in 1938, and as a final insult, the bank that had taken over the homestead refused his family’s request to have Walter interred in the mausoleum he built. He was buried in the cemetery at the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel instead. A sad ending for the man who had done so much to restore dignity to his family’s burial ground.

The Post-Temple Era

In the ‘40s the former Workman ranch was purchased by Lois Heaton Brown and her husband Harry. They used the existing buildings on the homestead as a convalescent hospital called El Encanto, before the state forced them to build a separate facility just to the north. The Brown family interred several family members in the mausoleum during their decades as owners, including Harry and Lois themselves. 

The homestead was sold in pieces to the City of Industry in the ‘60s and ’70s, and since 1981 it’s operated as a museum, run by a team of professional historians contracted by the City. As part of a $3.5 million restoration in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the City of Industry gave El Campo Santo the glowup it needed and deserved. They replaced the 1920s-era pipe fencing with three low brick walls, just as they would have originally appeared, using bricks from other historic sites. They repaired cracked walkways and replanted the landscaping. They also added a turtle pond, and laid down bricks on the path leading from the adobe to the cemetery, now known as the Pío Pico Memorial Walkway. 

Today, you can find remnants of every phase of El Campo Santo’s history, if you know where to look. The western brick wall and entrance gate were there from the cemetery’s beginnings in the 1850s (though the iron balls atop the piers have required some upkeep). The exquisite wrought ironwork on the inside gate is original, too. The mausoleum dates to the cemetery’s 1920s revival, and the restored brick walls and reconstructed heart planter date from the restoration phase in the late 1970s. 

Some of the more recent changes at El Campo Santo involve its longest-term tenants. 64 years after Walter P. Temple was denied a burial here, the City of Industry agreed to have his remains re-interred in the inner court of El Campo Santo in 2002. The arrangements were largely overseen by his granddaughter, Josette Laura Temple, who herself was buried in the inner court in 2020, just a few feet away from where her parents were laid to rest in 1998. Josette is apparently the last person who will ever be buried here. If that’s the case, her story provides a beautiful coda to a 175-year tradition of this influential extended family taking care of each other, in life and in death.

Thank you to Paul R. Spitzzeri and Michelle Muro of the Homestead Museum for their assistance with this post, and to Gennie Truelock for the tour of the Homestead Museum. 

El Campo Santo is open for free, self-guided tours, seven days a week from 9am to 5pm. Come on Friday, Saturday and Sunday (except the fourth weekend of the month) and you can also take a free tour of the Workman Adobe and La Casa Nueva.

Resources & Recommended Reading

+ “A Dreadful Thing.” (Los Angeles Daily Star, May 18, 1876 – via Newspapers.com)

+ City of Industry: “Employment Base” (https://www.cityofindustry.org)

+ “City of Industry” (Los Angeles Almanac © 1998-2025 Given Place Media, publishing as Los Angeles Almanac, visited October 23, 2025)

+ Ellerbe, Rose: “Honor for Ashes of Pio Pico.” (Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1921 – via ProQuest)

+ Galindo, Erick: “City of the Dead: The Forgotten History of the People of Los Angeles, Told By Six East L.A. Cemeteries” (LA Taco, October 22, 2025)

+ Gooch, Millard E., AIA: Workman Family Cemetery’s NRHP nomination form 

+ “Homestead Museum Introductory Video– English with subtitles” (VIDEO – @homesteadmuseum457 on YouTube, Sep 1, 2023)

+ “Introduction to the Homestead Museum” (VIDEO – @Clark3d on YouTube, November 8, 2011)

+ Meares, Hadley: “Family Plots: El Campo Santo Cemetery at the Workman-Temple Homestead” (PBSSocal.org, September 27, 2013)

+ “Obsequies of David Workman, Esq.” (Los Angeles Star, November 17, 1855 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “All in the Family/Beyond the Grave Two-Fer: The Death and Funeral of David Workman, 1855” (Homestead Museum Blog, October 27, 2017)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “‘All That Glitters in the Gilded Age’ Preview: A Triple Tragedy for the Workman and Temple Family in Early 1892” (Homestead Museum Blog, April 14, 2022)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “A Photographic Summary of El Campo Santo Cemetery at the Homestead Museum, 1890s-1920s” (Homestead Museum Blog, October 24, 2022)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “A Visitor Returns to the Homestead 77 Years Later!” (Homestead Museum Blog, May 5, 2018)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Artifact Spotlight: The Desecration of El Campo Santo Cemetery” (Homestead Museum Blog, January 20, 2016)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Behind the Scenes Postscript: The Owners of the Workman House, 1899-1917” (Homestead Museum Blog, February 21, 2021)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Beyond the Grave: Old Calvary Cemetery, Los Angeles, ca. 1890” (Homestead Museum Blog, October 15, 2016)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Indigenous Peoples Day and Native Peoples in the Homestead’s History” (Homestead Museum Blog, October 14, 2019)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “‘Joy Will Be Tempered With Sorrow’: The Death of Walter P. Temple and the Marriage of his Son Thomas), November 1938 (Homestead Music Blog, November 19, 2021)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Making a Statement With a “Report of Receipts and Expenditures, June 18th to July 17, 1921,” for Walter P. Temple” (Homestead Museum Blog, July 17, 2025)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “‘Never Was a Ceremony So Impressive’: The Dedication of the Walter P. Temple Memorial Mausoleum, 24 April 1921” (Homestead Museum Blog, April 25, 2021)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “On This Day/Beyond the Grave Two-Fer: The Death of John Rowland, 14 October 1873” (Homestead Museum Blog, October 14, 2017)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “On This Day: Laying the Cornerstone for St. Nicholas’ Chapel, El Campo Santo Cemetery, 30 May 1857” (Homestead Museum Blog, May 30, 2018)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “On This Day: The Death of Walter P. Temple, 13 November 1938” (Homestead Museum Blog, November 13, 2017)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “On This Day: The Death of William Workman, 17 May 1876” (Homestead Museum Blog, May 17, 2017)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Read All About It in the Los Angeles Weekly Herald, 3 July 1875, Part Three” (Homestead Museum Blog, July 6, 2025)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Remembering Josette Temple and Her Lifting Through Gifting” (Homestead Museum Blog, November 14, 2021)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Saying Goodbye to Josette Laura Temple (1936-2020)” (Homestead Museum Blog, November 18, 2020)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Taking a Shine to El Campo Santo Cemetery” (Homestead Museum Blog, June 27, 2018)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “Tombstone Tales Intermission: Don Pío Pico Remembered in The Land of Sunshine Magazine, October 1894” (Homestead Museum Blog, October 19, 2024)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: The Workman & Temple Families of Southern California, 1830-1930 (Seligson Publishing Incorporated, 2007)

+ Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “William Workman Prepares to Leave for California, 13-14 July 1841” (Homestead Museum Blog, July 13, 2018)

+ “Suicide of William Workman.” (Los Angeles Herald, May 19, 1876 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “The Brothers Workman” (Los Angeles Herald, May 20, 1876 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Would Sow Barley in Graveyard; Is Arrested” (Los Angeles Herald, December 5, 1905 – via Newspapers.com)