Description

Brenda Taylor, Librarian/Archivist, Sharlot Hall Museum Library & Archives, in white hat. Parker Anderson, Sharlot Hall Museum volunteer, in red hat.

The town of Cedar Glade began as a work camp for railroad workers during the construction of the railroad’s cut-off route between Prescott and Ash Fork, with its 165-foot high trestle over Hell Canyon completed in 1901. By 1917, businessman Herman Schwanbeck built a hotel, a restaurant, and a general store on the site, and Cedar Glade became a full-fledged town. The town’s name was changed in 1920 to Drake, after William Drake, who was building a new cut-off railroad line to Jerome.

After the nearby town Puntenney became a ghost town in the 1930s, Drake pressed on with limestone and flagstone mining through the 1950s, until it also became a ghost town. In 2011, a corporation purchased the land and constructed a large cement plant on the site, today known as Drake Cement.

The old Cedar Glade/Drake Cemetery still survives as a fenced enclosure inside the Drake Cement Plant, and cannot be visited without permission. It contains a number of newer markers for the deceased, placed there by the Arizona Pioneer Cemetery Research Project (APCRP). It is a small enclosure, and it is probable that some unmarked graves may have been paved over by the plant.

The old Puntenney Cemetery on the south side of Hell Canyon has a U.S. Forest Service sign identifying it as the Cedar Glade Cemetery, but APCRP historian Kathy Block claims this is an error.