Workman & Temple Family Homestead Museum (El Campo Santo)

The story

Tucked away behind the distribution warehouses and rail tracks of the City of Industry sits a six-acre time capsule that feels like an impossible glitch in Southern California's urban grid. In the 1840s, English immigrant William Workman built an adobe homestead here and carved out El Campo Santo, an un-paved private cemetery under an acre in size, to serve as the family burial ground. Decades later, a devastating 1870s bank collapse wiped out the family fortune and led to Workman’s suicide, leaving the estate in limbo until his grandson, Walter P. Temple, unexpectedly struck oil on family land in 1917.

Flush with sudden petroleum millions, Temple spent the 1920s constructing La Casa Nueva—a lavish Spanish Colonial Revival mansion full of handcrafted wood carvings and custom tilework—alongside a Neoclassical marble mausoleum inside El Campo Santo, enclosed behind a heavy Gothic-revival cast-iron fence. When Los Angeles demolished Old Calvary Cemetery in the 1920s to expand downtown, Temple stepped in to relocate the remains of Pío Pico, the last governor of Mexican California, and his wife Ygnacia to his private tomb. Walter Temple himself was finally re-interred alongside them in 2002.

Today, the site stands preserved by the City of Industry—a bizarrely quiet oasis of deep California history hidden in plain sight amidst diesel exhaust and logistics parks. You won't pay a dime to walk the path between an 1840s adobe, a 1920s oil baron's mansion, and the vault where Mexican California's last ruler sleeps.