Old St Patrick’s Cemetery

When St. Patrick's Cemetery closed its gates to incoming customers in 1906, it had served as the final resting place for Grass Valley's Irish Catholic community for 55 years. On the corner of Church and Chapel in Grass Valley, California, a cemetery filled with cedars and crumbling headstones takes up a small lot about the size of a city block. The grass is mowed but dried and yellow, and the gates around family plots have been swallowed by the massive tree trunks of the mighty trees that don't concern themselves with markers or fences.