On March 29, 1928, the body of a young boy who had remained unidentified in the makeshift Newhall morgue in the wake of the St. Francis Dam disaster was finally laid to rest.

In the hours after the March 12 catastrophic collapse of the St. Francis Dam, the Hap-a-Lan dance hall in Newhall, now the site of the Old Courthouse and Masonic Lodge, was converted into a temporary morgue to house the dead as their bodies were collected.

At least 78 bodies would be stacked on improvised wooden slabs in the days following the disaster, most were in night clothes or naked. Adding to the tragedy, many were near impossible to identify with the technology of the time, as their bodies had been mangled by being dragged – some for miles – by 12.5 billion gallons of water.

Volunteers worked for weeks to recover human remains.

Among those bodies was that of a blonde-haired, fair-skinned little boy, presumed to be about 3 years of age.

More than a week later, he remained unclaimed and unidentified.

His plight pulled at the heartstrings of the scarred community, prominent locals like William S. Hart, a famed silent film star and Newhall resident, arranged for the child’s burial, according to Newspaper accounts from the time.

“A mother, nerves taught, looking for her own child, placed a beautiful bouquet of sweet peas over the little fellow’s heart. A great movie actor, begging for the privilege of providing burial, placed a wreath, beautiful beyond description, at his head. On the card is inscribed, ‘To the little Unknown Soldier, from a Newhall Cowboy,’” read a March 29, 1938 article in the Newhall Signal.

According to legend, Hart had even ensured that the young boy was finely dressed up like a little cowboy, boots and all.

Then, on March 24, just one day before the little unknown soldier was set to be buried at the Ruiz Cemetery in San Francisquito Canyon, he was identified.

Though his first name has been lost to time, friends or family identified the young boy as the son of S.C. Trexler (alternatively spelled Prixler by the same journalist, who was known to misspell names frequently).

The Trexlers (or Prixlers) had been traveling through the Santa Clarita Valley, and had been lodged at McIntyre’s Camp, an auto park in Castaic Junction with cottages, a gas station and a café for travelers. The entire grounds of the small theme park were wiped out by floodwaters in the disaster.

The body of the little boy’s mother, Mrs. S.C. Trexler (or Prixler) was eventually recovered, but Mr. S.C. Trexler (Prixler) himself was not found within two weeks of the flood, as far as historical records show.

In light of this new information, funeral plans for the little cowboy were changed, and instead, it was arranged for his body to be sent to Oakwood Cemetery in Chatsworth.

On March 29, 1928, he was buried next to the woman assumed to be his mother.

In total, at least 431 people are believed to have been killed in the St. Francis Dam disaster. It is considered to be the worst civil engineering disaster of the 20th century.

Eventually, the bodies were cleared from the Hap-a-Lan dance hall. However, the traumatized community would not treat it as a community center the way they once did. The building was razed, and in 1931, construction began on a two-storey courthouse and Masonic Lodge, which still sits on the corner of Market Street and Railroad Avenue in Newhall.

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