Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainBakersfield's oldest cemetery, resting place of city founder Col. Thomas Baker and the frontier figures of early Kern County.
730 Potomac Avenue, Bakersfield, CA 93307
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free to visit. The cemetery office offers a printable self-guided walking-tour map of notable graves.
Access
Wheelchair OK
An active 27-acre cemetery with paved drives and grass sections; older headstone areas are uneven underfoot.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1872 · Oldest Cemetery in Bakersfield · Burial Place of Col. Thomas Baker · Frontier-Era Kern County History
Historic Union Cemetery dates to 1872, when Col. Thomas Baker — the founder and namesake of Bakersfield — was buried on the grounds. Baker, born in Ohio in 1810, trained as a lawyer and served as a state senator and militia colonel in Iowa before moving west during California's boom years and laying out the town that took his name.
The cemetery grew into the principal burial place of early Bakersfield. Spread across roughly 27 acres, it holds headstones and tombs reaching back to the late nineteenth century, including the graves of Civil War veterans and a range of frontier-era figures — lawmen, gunfighters, and outlaws among them — who passed through Kern County during its formative decades.
The cemetery office maintains a self-guided walking-tour map that points visitors to the most notable graves, framing the grounds as a record of the city's founding generations. Burial records for the cemetery have been transcribed and are available through genealogical archives, which document the breadth of families interred there.
The cemetery remains active and is operated alongside an on-site funeral home. It stands at 730 Potomac Avenue on the south side of Bakersfield and is regularly cited in local histories as the resting place of the people most closely tied to the city's beginnings.
Sources
Union Cemetery's haunted reputation rests on its age and the people buried there. As the resting place of city founders, Civil War soldiers, and frontier-era lawmen and outlaws, the grounds have accumulated the kind of after-dark folklore that gathers around old burial places, and the cemetery turns up regularly on lists of Bakersfield's most haunted sites.
The reported experiences described by local tellers are general and atmospheric — a sense of being watched, unease among the older sections — rather than tied to specific, named apparitions. A regional podcast devoted an episode to the cemetery's reputation, and the site is folded into Bakersfield ghost-tour itineraries that pair its frontier history with the eerie accounts.
The cemetery is an active, working burial ground, and the haunting reputation is secondary to its role as a historical record of early Bakersfield. Visitors come mainly for the self-guided history walk; the ghost-tour framing treats the grounds with the restraint appropriate to a place where people are still laid to rest.
Walk the grounds of Bakersfield's oldest cemetery using the office's printable self-tour map, which marks the graves of founder Col. Thomas Baker and other figures from the city's frontier era. The cemetery is a recognized stop on Bakersfield ghost-tour itineraries.
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