Quick Take
The tombstone of Mary Amney Case, Santa Cruz County’s first English-speaking schoolteacher, disappeared years ago and was believed to be stolen. Now, it has made its way to the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History after being found under a pile of leaves near a storage facility.
The tombstone that marked the grave of Santa Cruz County’s first English-speaking schoolteacher, which has been missing for years, has been recovered. It was found under a pile of leaves and dirt outside a storage facility near the Harvey West area of Santa Cruz.
The flat stone for the grave of Mary Amney Case, who died in 1889, was discovered by a Santa Cruz resident near the fenceline of a commercial storage business, according to Nick Ibarra, spokesperson for the Santa Cruz County Office of Education.
The office received a voicemail about the gravestone, Ibarra said: “They said, ‘You know what? We think we found a headstone. And by the way, we’re going to drop it off at your office later today.'”
County staff were intrigued and skeptical about whether the caller who had found the tombstone was telling the truth about her discovery, he said. An hour later, the nearly 40-pound headstone was dropped off.
The woman who found Amney Case’s gravestone posted about her discovery to a Facebook group for local history buffs.
“Once we hosed it off, we could see that it was important to Santa Cruz history,” Sandy Gembola wrote to the group Researchers Anonymous – Santa Cruz History. “Go figure how it ended up here…..I made a quick call to the Board of Education and now it’s on its way to BOE headquarters.” Lookout tried to contact Gembola but she did not return messages or emails.
Ibarra said the COE returned the tombstone to the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, which oversees Evergreen Cemetery, where Amney Case’s grave is located. The County Office of Education does many things to support local schools, but headstones are typically not part of that work, said Ibarra.
Jone Balestri, a volunteer at Evergreen Cemetery, spotted Gembola’s Facebook post about the grave marker. “It was a coincidence that I happened to look at that page,” she said.
Balestri, who helps maintain and clean gravesites at the cemetery, told Lookout that the tombstone most likely went missing between 2014 and 2020, and she suspects it was stolen. She said the stone that went missing replaced the original grave marker, which is still at Amney Case’s grave.
It’s rare for a stolen grave marker to be returned, Balestri said. Sometimes people do return tombstones, but that’s only if they feel really guilty about it. “We thought we would never see it again,” she said.
The tombstone was not damaged or vandalized and is in “pretty great shape,” according to MAH executive director Ginger Shulick Porcella. She said the museum would clean it up a little to ensure that it looks “shiny and new.”
From its appearance, the gravestone does not date back to the late 1800s, but it does read, “First public school teacher, Santa Cruz, Mary Amney Case, 1800-1889.” Balestri said the marker was installed in 2002. It was donated by a local group called the Questers, who are dedicated to keeping local history alive.
Amney Case was born in Vermont and came to California in a covered wagon with her family in 1847, according to the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. She and her husband built a home near Neary Lagoon.
She wanted her children to know how to read and write English, so she started teaching school in her home and welcomed other students in 1848. At the time, as Mexico ceded rule of Alta California to the United States, most people were illiterate and only a few children were educated at the Catholic missions.
Shulick Porcella said Amney Case’s tombstone will be displayed temporarily at the MAH beginning Nov. 21 as part of its HERstory exhibit, which highlights historic women from Santa Cruz County. Once the temperature gets warmer, the headstone will be reinstalled where it belongs, at Evergreen Cemetery, she said.
“The history community is very excited. It’s a major find for the history of Santa Cruz,” Shulick Porcella said. “She’s really one of the very first pioneers of Santa Cruz.”
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