HARSHAW — A graveyard in this ghost town — tucked away like a secret deep in the mountains south of Patagonia — is a place of rich remembrance thanks to the tireless efforts of one of the town’s native sons.
Miguel Soto, who was born in Harshaw in 1922 and died in 2012, spent his later years carrying out meticulous research on the lives of his departed ancestors and others now resting in the cemetery.
He wrote up summaries of their life stories, some dating back to the 1800s, and posted the brief biographies under laminated covers atop the graves.
“My father visited the cemetery and talked to people there,” said Juan Soto, Miguel’s son. “He became a sort of historian of the place, telling people about it. Eventually, he had the idea to write biographies of his family and other families after getting permission from them.”
The biographical documents he posted atop graves weathered in the years after the elder Soto’s passing at the age of 90.
“We’ve replaced them several times, two or three times,” said Juan, a retired vice president of student development at Pima Community College. “We haven’t changed a word. They are just the way he wrote them.”
A grave with a biographical document affixed to it.
REMOTE BUT REMEMBERED
The cemetery, in spite of its remote location along a bumpy dirt road about eight miles south of Patagonia, shows signs that it is cared for and visited by those who remember loved ones there.
Graves in the Harshaw cemetery.
Descendants of the departed have placed colorful artificial flowers on many of the several dozen hillside graves.
New markers have been added to some gravestones on which the original ones weathered away.
A child’s grave with an updated marker in the Harshaw cemetery.
And the biographies posted by Soto lend an enduring sense of life to this place of the dead, even though a stroke in his final years kept him from continuing the project to the end of his own life.
A sample of one of Soto’s postings about his ancestors:
“Josefa T. Soto, widow of Angel Soto, survived her husband by 25 years. When she became a widow, her children were young adults and adolescents. She died in 1925. Her existing 24 grandchildren have the last names of Soto, Jimenez, Moreno, Montenegro, and Villareal. Most of them have moved out of this area and some have stayed.
“Josefa lies next to her husband whose grave is to the left, next to her. Their family consisted of six girls and two boys. The two boys and two girls were buried in this cemetery. She lived her last years with her youngest daughter, Josefa S. Jimenez.
“All of her family live close except for two daughters who moved away when they got married. Elena S. Montenegro moved to Hayden, AZ, and Angela S. Villareal moved to Yuma, AZ. The Morenos later moved to Tucson and California.
“Of all the descendants of this extraordinary woman, the Soto and Jimenez families are still in the area. We consider ourselves pioneer families of Harshaw, which now is a ghost town. I am glad to share this biography with you.
— Miguel Soto”
A FAMILY OF HARSHAW
Angel and Josefa T. Soto settled in the area in the 1880s, around the time when Harshaw was a silver-mining town with perhaps as many as 2,000 residents.
In those days, the town had a mill, houses, stores, hotels and saloons.
“My dad was born there in 1922, and I lived there when I was very young before our family moved to Tucson in 1956,” Juan Soto said.
Miguel Soto spent his working years as a miner near Harshaw and elsewhere in Arizona, and he took pride in the educational achievements of Juan and his other children.
The abandoned Harshaw townsite and the cemetery are on land that is now managed by the U.S. Forest Service.
Little is left of the ghost town of Harshaw, where many buildings like this one have weathered away.
Because the agency isn’t allowing additional burials in the hillside cemetery, Miguel Soto is buried elsewhere, Juan said.
