After William Willmore relinquished his rights to the Willmore City/American Colony, the land was promptly renamed after its biggest asset: its eight mile long beach. The name suggested by Belle Lower, the wife of a local businessman William Lowe, won over "Crescent City" which was suggested by local businessmen.
 |
| Copy of original plat map |
The original American Colony map included a business sector near the oceanfront, parks, land for a college, residential lots and farm lots to the north. The Long Beach Cemetery Company incorporated on March 18, 1893, and later became the Long Beach Cemetery Corporation. In 1893, D.P. Thayer, president of the Long Beach Cemetery Company and superintendent of the Long Beach Water Company, filed a plot map detailing the location of the Signal Hill Cemetery as the "East 5 acres of Farm Lot 68 of the American Colony Tract" which is three miles northeast of the business area.
 |
| Sample of receipts for burial plots |
The cemetery was named for its location on a slope of Signal Hill, which was the highest point adjacent to Long Beach. Early native settles utilized the 365-foot elevation to signal others and so the Spanish named it Loma Sental. Several mansions were built atop the hill because of the view. Japanese farmers grew vegetables and collected garbage from the area to feed to their hogs. Signal Hill was included in the American Colony tract map but was not part of the newly incorporated city of Long Beach.
 |
| Oldest headstone in cemetery |
The Signal Hill Cemetery was deeded to the City of Long Beach in 1901 by the Long Beach Cemetery Corporation. It is not clear who operated the cemetery before it was given to the city or who exactly is buried there. The earliest burial is marked by a headstone with the date of 1878.
In 1936, fire destroyed many of the burial records. Some of the founders of Long Beach are buried there, and many others are buried steps away in the adjacent Sunnyside Cemetery.
There are a number of Civil War veterans buried in the Municipal Cemetery, including a former slave, Abraham Cleage, who enlisted in Company A of the 1st Colored Heavy Artillery Regiment in Knoxville. After his service, he and his wife moved to Texas and then Long Beach. Cleage served as a janitor in City Hall and died in 1908.
Today, Signal Hill Cemetery is known as the Municipal Cemetery of Long Beach and is operated by the Department of Parks, Recreation and Marine.
