CEMETERY REPAIR BRINGS CITY'S HISTORY TO LIGHT.

Byline: George Snyder San Francisco Chronicle 

Dead men - or at least their tombstones - do tell tales. Some were murdered, others came by covered wagon and died and one was the sole survivor of a Civil War raid.

These old stories are coming to light as volunteers working with the Santa Rosa Parks and Recreation Department clear away decades of brambles and bushes and right the toppled and broken stones in the city's nearly forgotten Rural Cemetery.

Some 5,500 bodies are buried in the old cemetery, including some of Santa Rosa's earliest residents.

Work reclaiming what had been an overgrown and long-neglected block of Santa Rosa history began in 1994 after a series of attacks by vandals. The city came up with $5,000, and volunteers got to work.

Now, instead of smashed or cracked tombstones and monuments - some crushed by vandals using pickup trucks and others shattered in the 1906 earthquake - some 700 restored graves stand under the oaks that shade the 17.5-acre site. The cemetery contains about 3,000 tombstones or other grave markers. Others were stolen, destroyed or were made of wood that has rotted away.

``Look at this monument right here,'' said Bill Montgomery, the city Parks and Recreation Department staffer heading the cleanup effort. He pointed at a towering granite obelisk marking the grave of Dr. A.B. Stuart, Santa Rosa's first (and possibly California's first) female doctor.

When Montgomery and other volunteers came upon the doctor's grave, the tip of the obelisk was broken off. A 14-ton crane was needed to lift and reunite the tip with its base, and volunteers used a special epoxy to glue the stone together, Montgomery said.

After the doctor's death in 1914, some of the children she helped deliver put flowers on a fountain built in her honor at the old Carnegie Library downtown, Montgomery said.

``One of the children, now an elderly lady, told me about the ceremony herself,'' he said. ``She even showed me a picture of herself taken at the memorial. There are all kinds of stories like that.''

One story involves Sgt. T.M. Goodman, a Union Army officer during the Civil War. Goodman was the only survivor of an 1863 raid by notorious Confederate guerrilla leader ``Bloody Bill'' Anderson, who executed all of Goodman's troopers but let the sergeant live to deliver the news to his Union Army officers.

Once a grassy knoll on the farm of the Fulkerson family in the 1850s, what became the Rural Cemetery received its first known body in 1854, after the drowning death of a 31-year-old Fulkerson relative who had just arrived via wagon train.

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Photo: An oak tree encroaches on a 94-year-old tombstone at the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery in Northern California.

Associated Press