Agua Mansa Pioneer Cemetery

Agua Mansa Pioneer Cemetery is a certified California Historical Landmark administered by the San Bernardino County Museum. The cemetery preserves the burial grounds of the twin communities of Agua Mansa and La Placita, the first non-native settlements in the San Bernardino Valley, established in the 1840s as farming communities along the Santa Ana River. The villages were largely destroyed in a catastrophic flood in January 1862, but the cemetery survives as a historical record. In 1967, after decades of preservation work by volunteer descendant Marie Espinosa Wood and the "Friends for the Preservation of the Agua Mansa Pioneer Cemetery," the site was acquired by San Bernardino County. The cemetery now features burial markers in Spanish, a full-size replica of the 1853 San Salvador chapel constructed in 1978, and an accessible database of identified burials spanning 1854–1963.