(Left) Tom Nicholson surveys the Pauper’s Graveyard area with ground-penetrating radar, then Mike Karsikis (right) uses flags to mark the discovered graves.
DOWNIEVILLE — The Downieville Cemetery is renowned for the beauty of its location and the high quality maintenance it has received over the past couple of centuries. However, over the course of several decades the Pauper’s Graveyard, found in a gully on the western edge of the Cemetery, became overrun with vegetation.
Recognizing the historic value of the both the Cemetery and the Graveyard, the Sierra County Historical Society (SCHS), the Downieville Improvement Group (DIG), and Downieville Cemetery District (DCD) sponsored a clean-up of the Graveyard several weeks ago and several local residents spent a morning removing poison oak, other shrubs, and small trees from the area.
As a result of this work, much of the Pauper’s Graveyard became suitable for examination last week by a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) device operated by Tom Nicholson of Sierra Nevada GSI (Ground Scanning Imagery) with assistance from his apprentice Mike Karsikis.
The display of the ground-penetrating radar machine.
The unit carries two antennas, one to transmit an electromagnetic pulse into the ground and another to receive echoes of the pulses generated by different materials found in the soil. Thus, Nicholson, based in Truckee, with over twenty years of experience with this tool while providing data to construction engineers, archeologists, and geologists, was able to identify 40 burial spots due to moisture anomalies caused by disturbed earth in the Pauper’s Graveyard during his first pass over this area. No, his GPR device did not display coffins. All of the graves date prior to the advent of metal coffins and the wooden coffins used prior to the 1940s rotted long ago.
Meanwhile, from research done by a local resident back in the 1980s, the identity of 72 persons buried in the Pauper’s Graveyard is known. Moreover, Corri Jimenez of the SCHS has successfully used Ancestry.com to establish the birth and death dates for 59 of the 72 persons believed to be in the graveyard and she has posted this information on findagrave.com.
In the near future, volunteers will again be asked to help remove remaining obstacles to Nicholson’s use of the GPR. Given the initial results from scanning the ground at the graveyard, the odds of a second pass over the area expanding the number of graves at the site are good.