Local historian David Petry, author of “The Best Last Place: a History of the Santa Barbara Cemetery,” will conduct a Historic Walking Tour of the Santa Barbara Cemetery, 1-3:30 p.m. Sunday, May 26. Participants should meet at the Cemetery Chapel, 901 Channel Drive.
Cost to attend is $25 per person; pay at the door via cash or check, or pay online at www.thegreatgetgone.com. To register, email dlpetry@gmail.com or call 805-689-3423.
Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the Santa Barbara Cemetery is the last resting place of actors, industrialists, authors, musicians, sports stars, and many of the city’s founders and leaders.
The cemetery has gone through five separate incarnations, Petry reports: as a dusty, geometric town cemetery; a rudely conceived rural cemetery; a lawn park cemetery; an over-achieving memorial park; and as a local columbarium.
The Santa Barbara Cemetery has embraced each of these phases and has built upon them, becoming a modern cemetery that is better than any of the models it followed, Petry said.
The outing provides a history of the cemetery and a one-mile walking tour to the most interesting gravesites and sections of the cemetery.
Visitors will see the burial sites of town leaders Charles Fernald and Thomas More Storke; actors Ronald Colman, Laurence Harvey, and his daughter Domino; murderer Cyrus Barnard; gold magnate Augustus Sahlberg; business founders Jheri Redding, Sam Battistone, David Nancarrow, and George Oscar Mayer.
The tour takes 2½-3 hours. Participants should wear comfortable walking shoes and bring sunglasses, hats, sunscreen and water.