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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Today the St. Francis dam site is in ruins, having long-ago been dynamited into small

blocks of crumbling conglomerate. The base of a monument once marking the dam’s place

on the landscape remains, its plaque vandalized and removed days after initially being

installed. The ruins are accessible by foot path along an abandoned road section that

intersects with San Francisquito Canyon Road, within the boundaries of the Angeles National

Forest (ANF). A California Historical Landmark plaque recognizing the disaster sits 1.4

miles below the dam site behind a chain-linked fence in front of Los Angeles Department of

Water and Power’s (LADWP) San Francisquito Power Plant No. 2. Two cork boards behind

glass in an adjacent parking lot display sun-faded photos of the dam in all its glory, as well as

the floods aftermath. A few miles downstream from the former dam ruins, a monument to

the flood victims sits in a small family burying ground on private property; its inscription

obliterated by the effects of the arid climate and a forest fire, which burned through the area

in 2002. Forty-five miles away, down the Santa Clara River Valley in Santa Paula, a

monument recognizing heroes and survivors of the disaster can be found in the town center

near a historic train depot; in a nearby cemetery, a memorial honors unidentified flood

victims. Dispersed throughout the flood zone, 173 victims are interred in six cemeteries; half

of these graves remain unmarked. Another 135 victims are buried in 58 cemeteries around

Southern California and across the United States. As many as 117 individuals remain missing

to this day.

This research focused on how Southern California’s St. Francis Dam disaster of 1928

and its victims are remembered and memorialized. Both have been forgotten on a state and

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