Yes, there really was a Lathrop Cemetery.
Frank Mendes will attest to that.
“There used to be a cemetery that went back to Civil War days. Right where (the now-defunct) Lathrop Corner Café was located but a little farther off the road, farther south,” said Mendes who grew up on a huge ranch along the San Joaquin River between Dos Reis Road and River Islands Parkway and about right where Lathrop High School stands today.
“From the story I heard, there was a guy by the name of Johnson, a very wealthy man, and he started that cemetery. There was a big stone monument of him; I think it was on (the old) Johnson Ferry Road,” recalled the octogenarian Mendes who is a retired Lathrop-Manteca farmer.
When Johnson purchased the property for the cemetery, “they made a mistake in the survey, so they moved all the buried people out of there and put them in Park View (cemetery)” on French Camp Road in Manteca, Mendes said.
“When I was working on the (Interstate 5) highway there (at the old cemetery place) with a bulldozer, we dug out some 11 graves, and (P.L.) Fry put them in small boxes” and they were taken to Park View, he said.
They “dug up quite a few (grave) monuments,” he said. He remembered seeing a marble grave marker with the date marking the death of a woman in 1898.
Mendes was part of the crew that built the portion of Interstate 5 in Lathrop in the early 1970s – “about 1972,” he said.
“We pumped a lot of that dirt out of the bottom of the river. The river was very shallow then. You could walk across the river at Mossdale on sands. So they pumped north and south of Mossdale; they had huge pumps. The big pumps were running day and night.”
And wherever they pumped the sand, “that’s where they put the highway, then they just trimmed the edges because it was kind of real runny. It made a good road bed,” he said.
“They bought the rest of the dirt from Budge Brown; that’s how Oakwood Lake started. He didn’t have water slides there yet at the time,” recalled Mendes who saved some of the old road signs that were discarded and replaced with new ones.
The road signs are now part of his eclectic collection of various memorabilia that includes a campaign billboard of former California governor Pat Brown, the father of the recently elected governor of the Golden State for the second time, Jerry Brown. Mendes had the pumpkin-orange Pat Brown campaign sign displayed at his front gate during the days before the 2010 November 3 elections.
Frank Mendes will attest to that.
“There used to be a cemetery that went back to Civil War days. Right where (the now-defunct) Lathrop Corner Café was located but a little farther off the road, farther south,” said Mendes who grew up on a huge ranch along the San Joaquin River between Dos Reis Road and River Islands Parkway and about right where Lathrop High School stands today.
“From the story I heard, there was a guy by the name of Johnson, a very wealthy man, and he started that cemetery. There was a big stone monument of him; I think it was on (the old) Johnson Ferry Road,” recalled the octogenarian Mendes who is a retired Lathrop-Manteca farmer.
When Johnson purchased the property for the cemetery, “they made a mistake in the survey, so they moved all the buried people out of there and put them in Park View (cemetery)” on French Camp Road in Manteca, Mendes said.
“When I was working on the (Interstate 5) highway there (at the old cemetery place) with a bulldozer, we dug out some 11 graves, and (P.L.) Fry put them in small boxes” and they were taken to Park View, he said.
They “dug up quite a few (grave) monuments,” he said. He remembered seeing a marble grave marker with the date marking the death of a woman in 1898.
Mendes was part of the crew that built the portion of Interstate 5 in Lathrop in the early 1970s – “about 1972,” he said.
“We pumped a lot of that dirt out of the bottom of the river. The river was very shallow then. You could walk across the river at Mossdale on sands. So they pumped north and south of Mossdale; they had huge pumps. The big pumps were running day and night.”
And wherever they pumped the sand, “that’s where they put the highway, then they just trimmed the edges because it was kind of real runny. It made a good road bed,” he said.
“They bought the rest of the dirt from Budge Brown; that’s how Oakwood Lake started. He didn’t have water slides there yet at the time,” recalled Mendes who saved some of the old road signs that were discarded and replaced with new ones.
The road signs are now part of his eclectic collection of various memorabilia that includes a campaign billboard of former California governor Pat Brown, the father of the recently elected governor of the Golden State for the second time, Jerry Brown. Mendes had the pumpkin-orange Pat Brown campaign sign displayed at his front gate during the days before the 2010 November 3 elections.
