Dishonoring the Dead : Oxnard: Although historic Hueneme Masonic Cemetery is the resting place of city leaders and pioneers, the site is in ruins, left to vandals. There are no resources to restore or protect it.

It is a proud name in Oxnard history, a family that settled vast stretches of farmland and helped establish a thriving port.

But today, the Saviers headstone lies broken in a neglected cemetery, the granite obelisk covered with mud and littered with fragments of a Bud Lite bottle.

Once the finest burial ground on the Oxnard Plain, the three-acre Hueneme Masonic Cemetery has become a ruined graveyard: its headstones broken and its plots covered with spongy ice plant and trash.

Nobody is stopping the deterioration. The century-old site between Etting and Pleasant Valley roads is not a historical landmark. And even if it were, the distinction would protect it chiefly from development, not vandalism.

Oxnard code enforcement officials leave the maintenance of private cemeteries to the owners. And the people who bought the plots at the Masonic graveyard have long since died.

The corporation set up to maintain the cemetery, the Hueneme Masonic Cemetery Assn., uses its dwindling bank account to pay state taxes. With recent tax increases, that money could run out by the end of the decade.

“I don’t know what the state is going to do then,” said R. Blinn Maxwell, the Oxnard attorney who represents the association. “They can’t condemn a cemetery.”

The graveyard is actually older than Oxnard: Its first plots sold in 1898, five years before the city incorporated. In those days, farmers and merchants had to travel to Camarillo to bury their dead. Tired of the long journey, community leaders, including banker A. Levy, started their own cemetery. For the most part, it was up to families to maintain the plots they bought.

“It was a landmark out here,” recalled Robert Naumann, 82, who has lived next to the Masonic site for decades. The original owners gave a corner of the cemetery to Japanese workers for their own burial ground. At the center of the site were burial plots of city founders, farmers and pioneers who settled in the region. Naumann remembers attending a military funeral when he was a child.

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A dirt road once ran down the center of the graveyard and a small well sat to the side. Bouquets of flowers once decorated the granite headstones, engraved with names such as Richard Cox and Permeliah Arnold. Now the only flowers there are the yellow blooms on the ice plant.

Beverage bottles and broken glass lie among the graves. Robert Naumann’s son Frank has found even stranger things: candles, dead chickens and burned debris suggesting rituals.

“Kids have gotten in here in the last few years and started vandalizing the place,” said Naumann, brushing the dirt off a fallen gravestone. “It’d be nice if they’d just leave it alone.”

The city can do little to stop the destruction, said Oxnard City Councilman Michael A. Plisky. “How can you protect them?” he asked. “It’s against the law to destroy private property.

“Perhaps the best we can do is stake that place out, catch the kids and send them to Singapore,” where vandalism is severely punished, he added.

And if the cemetery’s problem is merely old age, said Plisky, “I certainly don’t think it’s the city’s responsibility to pay to keep it up.”

John Coultas, a member of the Oxnard Masonic Lodge whose great-great-uncle is buried at the cemetery, would like his group to take on that responsibility. But he added: “There’s no money left to take care of it. We kind of look after it, but there’s no money left.”

The cemetery lost its main source of revenue--selling plots--when larger cemeteries opened, offering perpetual-care plans. These were more costly but convenient because the plans provide for maintenance of the plots. No one has been buried at the Masonic site since at least 1949.

The corporation running it has about $5,000 left in its account, but with recent tax increases, must pay $800 a year to the state.

Maxwell said Job’s Daughters, a woman’s auxiliary to the Masons, are considering whether to take on the project. In the meantime, the Naumanns next door do what they can to maintain the cemetery: planting trees along the edge of the site and putting in ice plant when the drought killed all other vegetation.

“I don’t know who else would undertake it,” Robert Naumann said. “These lots were sold in the 1900s. The people who originally bought them have either moved away or lost interest or died.”