I was asked how old the Arroyo Grande District Cemetery was, and I still don’t know the definitive answer. Thanks to the San Luis Obispo Genealogical Society, I launched a search that revealed the oldest graves—there are three—date from 1881.

Then I noticed that two of the burials were girls named “Hess.” Then, thanks to the Find a Grave website, I found them. They were sisters and they died within a week of each other. I will never know why, but there was a worldwide cholera outbreak in 1881, and it claimed about 30,000 lives in the Americas, so there’s a chance that this is what took Louisa and Lenna from their parents.

Their parents were immigrants from Hesse, Germany; the entry in the 1880 Census for Arroyo Grande doesn’t include Lenna, who probably was still in her mother’s womb when the enumerator came to visit.

Henry Hess was a successful man but the irony is that the fruits of his hard work as a farmer were recognized in this piece from the San Luis Tribune, published just four days before he lost Louisa.

When we studied childhood in AP European history at Arroyo Grande High School, the callous and even cruel way that children were treated in early modern Europe was shocking to us. It was in part a function of childhood mortality rates; parents could not afford the emotional investment in children who were more likely than not to die, so they became little worker drones in European farm families.

It was farming that changed that attitude. The Agricultural Revolution of the 1600s-1800s (crop rotation and new farm implements like the seed drill were among the contributors) exponentially increased Europe’s food supply. Better diet meant more and more children survived to adulthood. That fact may have deepened the ties between parents and their children.

In fact, macabre as it may seem to us, photography, in its infancy, meant that families with some substance had their dead children memorialized. This meant that they loved them so much—and that death in children was becoming an aberration—that they didn’t want to let their babies go.

But California, even in the 1880s, was still on the frontier and medicine was still relatively primitive. Farmers all across America, like Mr. Hess, would have consulted cure-alls like this: Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup included generous helpings of alcohol and opium.

And this cure-all, from an 1881 San Francisco newspaper ad, included cholera among the afflictions that it claimed to treat.

In the years before Dr. Paulding came to Arroyo Grande in the late 1880s, and before his brother established the town’s first drug store, the Sears Roebuck Catalogue was the pharmacy for American farmers. (The film Tombstone, among others, depicted Mattie Blaylock, Wyatt Earp’s common-law wife, and her struggle with addiction to laudanum.)

So children’s health was still precarious in frontier Arroyo Grande. While the evidence is indirect, I suspect that Mr. and Mrs. Hess were devastated. Despite his success in Arroyo Grande, he would be buried in Santa Clara. Maybe he had to get away from 1881 and what it had done to him.

Arroyo Grande’s founder, Francis Branch, was devastated, too, by the loss of three daughters, taken by smallpox, in the summer of 1862. But he missed them so much that, twelve years later, he was buried next to his little girls.