Tim Mock, a resident of Canyon Lake, Texas, likes to go to estate sales in his spare time.
“I was at one in Smithson Valley, a former horse training facility, and I went into the barn, looking for tools, when I saw this headstone on the floor in the corner,” Mock explained. “I asked the person running the sale how much and she said $15 – then I asked her if there was a story that came with it.
The 27-pound marble stone that measures 9” X 17”, bears a carving of a flower with a broken stem above the words: “WILLIE K., SON OF J.H. and A. Whitney. Died Dec. 4, 1881; AGED 5 Yr’s, 11 Mo’s, 18 Dy’s.” The stone is broken below the last line.
“She said that it had come to them in the back of a horse trailer that had been swept out years ago,” he continued. “I brought it home and posted a photo on Facebook in May, asking if any friends or amateur sleuths had any ideas where this might have come from.”
John and Amanda Whitney came to the SCV in 1875 from Ohio. John was a carpenter who worked on the Pioneer Oil Refinery and one of four men who filed an oil claim in the canyon located just outside the Rancho San Francisco boundary and east of the Lyons Station Cemetery (the current Eternal Valley). Willie died of diphtheria in 1881, followed by his sisters Nettie and Mable in 1888. They were buried on a hillside to the south of what was named Whitney Canyon and in 1958, their headstones moved a short distance to the Pioneer section of Eternal Valley.
A friend searching newspaper archives found a 1958 Signal article stating that Willie and Nettie’s headstones had gone missing, leading Mock to reach out to scvhs.org. He quickly got a response and pictures that confirmed that Willie’s headstone was indeed his estate sale find.
“When I saw the picture of his (Willie’s) sisters’ headstones, I could see they were identical,” he said.
Getting the headstone home became Mock’s quest. As fate might have it, a former COC archaeology student Brandon Kimball, who moved to Texas after graduation, saw the social media exchanges and reached out to the Historical Society, offering to bring the headstone back to the Santa Clarita Valley.
In June, Kimball delivered Willie K. Whitney’s tombstone to the SCV Historical Society and visited the Garden of the Pioneers at Eternal Valley to “reunite” the siblings’ grave markers. (Since the tombstones were moved without moving the bodies, they are actually cenotaphs. Once a headstone has been moved away from a grave, it is no longer a “grave marker”)
The SCV Historical Society, City of Santa Clarita and Eternal Valley are planning a resetting of Willie’s stone next to Mable’s in the future. The ceremonies will be open to the public and will be announced on the SCVHS website at scvhs.org. For more details about Whitney Canyon and the Whitney family, visit www.scvhistory.com. 

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