Sebastopol's historic cemetery is up for sale
Sebastopol Memorial Lawn, with graves dating back to 1859, is for sale for $3 million
Steve Lang, the owner of Sebastopol Memorial Lawn, is ready to retire, and, on November 2, the cemetery was put on the market for $3 million. Already Nextdoor and Facebook are abuzz with worries about what’s going to happen to the graves there and to the cemetery itself, a touching reminder of Sebastopol’s pioneer past.
Lang has seen some of the concerns and speculation on social media and wants to put people’s minds at ease.
“I just wanted to let you know there is absolutely no possibility that the cemetery property will ever be developed,” he said. “It remains as it is forever and will be that way. The state of California is very, very strict about that,” Lang said.
According to the Sebastopol Planning Department, the entire property is currently zoned as “community facility.”
The cemetery was founded in 1858. “It was started by the Odd Fellows, then the Masons took it over,” Lang said. “And after the Masons, then the O’Leary family had it, and then Lloyd Hayes and Ray Spillers took it over from the O’Learys, and then I took it over from them.”
Lang has run the cemetery for 45 years, but now that he’s older, it’s just too big of a job.
“It’s a lot,” he said. “I have no immediate family of my own. My stepson is in San Diego, and he does computer systems, and he’s not interested in it. He’s helped me before, but he’s got his own life. So my wife and I talked about it, and we decided it’s time—somebody else can take it over.”
Lang has struggled over the last several years to keep up with the regulatory requirements of the State of California’s Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, which is part of the California Department of Consumer Affairs. His cemetery manager license was placed on probation in December 2022. The department issued more citations as recently as February 2023. (See various citations and orders listed on the Cemetery and Funeral Bureau website, under Stephen Lang.) According to that site, his cemetery manager license expired in June 2024.
The maintenance of the property has suffered over the years, and Lang said that the system the state of California has in place, called Endowment Care, isn’t sufficient to keep it up.
Sebastopol Memorial Lawn pays into a fund that is supposed to ensure that graves are taken care of in perpetuity.
According to a 2017 report by the Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, “cemeteries must create an endowment care trust fund…and are required to deposit funds to the trust for each interment space they sell.”
Unfortunately, that same report found that “although endowment care cemeteries deposit at least the minimum amounts required by law, there is a substantial statewide shortfall.”
More room for the dead—and the living?
The Sebastopol Memorial Lawn property is 20.85 acres and is located within the city limits of Sebastopol. According to the listing agent, Rick O’Brien of O’Brien Real Estate, there are six undeveloped acres at the south end of the property that are not currently a part of the cemetery.
While the section with graves can’t be developed, Lang said a previous cemetery owner subdivided the property, had a section with no graves on it rezoned as “residential,” and built the Mitchell Court housing development. A new owner could conceivably do the same thing with some or all of the six undeveloped acres of the property currently not in use for burials.
O’Brien said the property is being sold as both land and a business, which he said explains the $3 million price tag.
“There’s development potential, and the six acres of developable land is a sizable chunk that a lot of cemeteries would love to have,” he said. “And also, according to Steve, he’s got a large percentage of the active part of the cemetery, that is available. I think he said only about 50% has been filled in. There’s still another 50% of land on that side that’s available for traditional burials. It’s a large cemetery and it’s an old cemetery, but it’s still also got a lot of usable land.”
Someone will be dying to buy it.
The first time I went to this cemetery, I was astonished. It has some beautiful graves and a mausoleum.