Excavation for a new parking garage at the Denver Botanic Gardens, which sits atop an old cemetery, came to an abrupt halt at noon Friday when the Denver Coroner’s Office announced that an old grave had been discovered.
“The bones will be removed and given to the mortuary for direct burial,” said Michelle Weiss-Samaras, Denver’s chief deputy coroner.
The discovery of bones was hardly unexpected, said Larry Conyers, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Denver. “That whole area used to be the city graveyard,” he said.
In 1858, when Gen. William Larimer claim-jumped land from the Arapaho tribe to create Denver, he put the city’s cemetery in a field now home to Cheesman and Congress parks and the botanic gardens.
Every year, Conyers takes students to Cheesman Park, where he says a lot of coffins remain buried.
“I know where there are a whole bunch of caskets — adults and children,” said Conyers, one of the world’s leading experts in ground- penetrating radar.
Will Jones, spokesman for the botanic gardens, 1005 York St., said excavation for the new three-story parking structure, which will hold an estimated 320 cars, began about three weeks ago.
Because botanic gardens officials didn’t want to block the view of people living in the surrounding neighborhood, a decision was made to have two levels below ground.
Aware that the area used to be a cemetery, the gardens contacted the coroner’s office to coordinate efforts in the event that graves were found, said Jones.
“We didn’t think we’d find anything,” said Jones, adding that the coroner’s office stated, “If you find anything that looks like anything, stop!”
So when construction workers spotted what looked like splintered wood and possible human remains about midday, everything stopped and the coroner’s office was contacted.
Around 1950, Jones said, about 9,000 bodies were removed from Cheesman and Congress parks and the botanic gardens area.
But Conyers said the area is still full of caskets and corpses.
When he goes to the area, he often notices lumpy depressions in the land. The topsoil covering graveyards often appears lumpy because of collapsed wooden caskets, Conyers said. Even in places where bodies had been exhumed, the refilling of holes with different soil can cause pits in the land.
Officials from the coroner’s office spent about four hours at the site Friday and were to resume digging at the site Saturday morning.
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
