The graves of the Greenlaw children inspired Jack London to request that his ashes might someday lie next to little David and Lillie. John and Lillie Greenlaw, Scottish and Irish immigrants, lived on this land in the 1870s. John, a ship builder, tried his hand at ranching by planting a vineyard, but phylloxera, a disease caused by a root louse, infected the vineyard as well as many across California and Europe, causing a disastrous grapevine epidemic. John Greenlaw abandoned his vineyard dream and moved his family, leaving behind the two children's graves. Jack London first visited this spot about 1905 and revisited it in his novel Burning Daylight in 1910, where he came abruptly upon the cypresses enclosed in a small square of ancient fence, with hand-hewn and sharpened pickets, and inside the mounds of two children's graves with hand-hewn wooden headboards for Little David, born 1855 and died 1859, and Little Lily, born 1853 and died 1860.