Hidden California desert pet cemetery holds unexpected piece of White House history
When members of the Secret Service swarmed Charley Stewart’s plot of land in the middle of California's Sonoran Desert, he wasn’t confused or worried — he knew what they had come for.
"They have representatives, the Secret Service, and the secretaries, and all those people come by," he told Fox News Digital. "It’s like a circus."
Stewart owns and operates Haven for Pets, a pet cemetery in Desert Hot Springs. When one of the nation’s most famous dogs — former President Gerald Ford’s golden retriever, Liberty — was set to be buried there, Secret Service agents visited the cemetery to inspect the grounds ahead of the burial, Stewart said.
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"Before she got buried out there, the Secret Service had to go out and look for mines and walk around," said the cemetery owner. "I mean, Gerald Ford was the President of the United States."
The female golden retriever arrived at the White House as a puppy and became the nation’s first dog, later giving birth to nine puppies in 1975 on the third floor of the White House.
Liberty was the first dog to give birth in the White House.
The frequently photographed canine enjoyed the White House life. She posed on the North Lawn, lounged beside the commander in chief in the Oval Office, swam in the pool at Camp David and even received fan mail from Americans across the country.
The Fords kept one of Liberty’s puppies, a female named Misty, who is buried alongside her mother at Haven for Pets. Their grave sites leave an unexpected piece of presidential history tucked away in Stewart’s pet cemetery.
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Stewart’s Haven for Pets dates back to the 1960s. It opened as an extension of a full-service Palm Springs kennel called Dogtown USA, which was known for providing grooming services to celebrity pets.
Dogtown was purchased by Stewart’s father, Charles Stewart, in 1959, and Stewart recalled the story of how the pet cemetery came to be.
"My father told me a story one time — he went over to talk to some people and their dog had died, and they threw it in a garbage can, and the head was hanging out," Stewart said. "From that horrible sight, my father said, ‘We’ve got to take care of these babies.’ And so he decided to do that."
"It took a couple years to do the paperwork, but that’s what he did … This was an input my father never got over," he added.
Haven for Pets’ celebrity canine clientele extends beyond the White House, all the way to Hollywood.
World-famous pianist Liberace has six of his dogs buried in the cemetery, under headstones that list their owner as "Lee," his nickname. Actor Michael Landon and Academy Award-winning composer Jimmy Van Heusen also have their pets buried there.
Stewart told Fox News Digital the VIP connections grew out of his family’s work caring for pets belonging to celebrities who lived in the Coachella Valley.
"Going back to Leonard Firestone and the Marx Brothers down here in Thunderbird Country Club, my dad would take care of their dogs," he shared. "We’d groom them and we boarded them … We did business with them."
Roughly 1,000 pets are buried in the cemetery. In its early days decades ago, the burial rate was $35. These days it costs nearly $900.
Stewart said that, at one point, the cemetery would handle five burials a week, but the figure has fallen to three or four a year because he wants to limit the frequency of burials and extend the life of the cemetery grounds.
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Stewart told Fox News Digital the unadvertised cemetery is not easy to find — and he intends to keep it that way.
"I don’t advertise the cemetery, it’s all word of mouth," he said. "I don’t want to speed up the process. The cemetery right now is set up in a way that it’s going to last way in excess of 200 years."
Stewart, who has been part of the cemetery for nearly his entire life, said he spends about two hours each day sitting in a lawn chair among the headstones, surrounded by the animals he believes "never die" — and keeping watch over Liberty.