Memorials to aviation history at Pierce Bros./Valhalla Cemetery in Burbank.
Some of the plaques on View seem not to be grave markers – for obvious reasons, Amelia Earhart isn’t buried in Burbank. But considering how many hours of her exciting young life she trained and flew over the Valley, this would be a fitting resting place for her remains, could they ever be recovered.
Happy Halloween from the Portal of the Folded Wings, a section of Pierce Bros./Valhalla Cemetery in Burbank.
Adjacent to the runways of historic Burbank Airport, this monument serves as a kind of community memorial – one of the few – of the huge role the San Fernando Valley played in the mid-century aviation industry, later dubbed “defense,” later still, “aerospace”. This industry, with its thousands of high-paying jobs, filled the Valley with middle-class settlers, mostly from the Midwest, during the 1930s to the 80′s. Then poof! the entire industry – the hangars, the fliers, the defense plants and services, the middle-class Midwesterners – vanished into ghosts. Some, at least, of those fliers and workers are buried here.
It is a strange, ghostly memorial: the grand Spanish Baroque archway lists quite a bit to the north, like a tilted tombstone. The plaque is vague on what it was built for, or where, or how it came here.
The space shuttle model, sadly, but frugally, commemorates both the Challenger and the Columbia disasters, depending on the side from which one Views the fuselage.
The Santuario San Lorenzo, on San Lorenzo Street in the Santa Monica Canyon.
This is a tiny plot of hallowed ground, with a shrine devoted to St. Lawrence. It has been a cemetery since 1839 for the Pasqual-Marquez family, which held the grant for Rancho Boca de Santa Monica. The Californio family plot is sandwiched between ordinary house-lots (not that there are ordinary houses in SM Canyon…) If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d think the lot was anybody’s beautifully-landscaped-with-native-California-plants front yard.
The neighborhood raised the funds to preserve and restore this historic link to Southern Californio’s rancho past. Bravo to the neighborhood for understanding the value of keeping alive their own connection to the pioneers of Old California.
The Culpeper National Cemetery. Many thousan’ gone.
These are the special memorials set up by the State of New York and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,, to honor Civil War regiments buried at Culpeper. This tiny market town was the local rail head, and thus the graveyard, for the huge armies constantly clashing in the Virginia Piedmont.
There is powerful medicine in the ground here.
The blood-slicked pontoon bridges at Fredericksburg. The hellish artillery fusillades at Chancellorsville. Snipers crackling in the trees at Payne’s Farm, aka Mine Run. The Plank Road that led Grant out of the Wilderness, but straight into the “Bloody Angle” at Spotsylvania Courthouse eight miles south. The charge at Brandy Station, the largest cavalry battle of the war.
There are WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and other vets buried in this beautiful cemetery, too, many with their wives.
The Valley Village View 