In these tight economic times, the dead, as well as the living, have to do with less.
Riverside Cemetery, Denver’s oldest and creepiest boneyard, lost its rights in the relentless Denver metro area battle over water. The bluegrass is mostly gone, the trees are dying, and the dead are shivering in their graves.
In 1820, explorer Stephen H. Long — in the first official U.S. report on the South Platte Valley — labeled our area “The Great American Desert.” Leave it, Long advised, to the Indians and the buffalo. Unfortunately for the Arapaho, Cheyenne and American bison, a gold rush changed that. In one of the great mass migrations in U.S. history, 100,000 fortune-seekers swarmed into what quickly became Denver City and Colorado Territory.
Although town founder William Larimer and Rocky Mountain News founding editor William Byers proclaimed Denver the healthiest place on earth, a few residents of the gun-slinging town died of “lead poison.” After such shootouts, others died of “rope burn,” thanks to “Judge Lynch.”
So a boot hill, later sanctified as Denver’s City Cemetery, was planted on a hill outside of town. When that burial ground evolved into Cheesman Park, its residents were relocated. Many were moved to a new garden-like cemetery, Riverside, which lay beside the South Platte River at 5201 Brighton Blvd.
When drought arrived in the early 19th century, water that had been allocated to Riverside disappeared. Fairmount Mortuary and Cemetery Association, which built the much larger and more fashionable Fairmount Cemetery in 1890, had bought out Riverside in 1900. Socially aspiring Denverites shunned Riverside’s increasingly industrial neighborhood. Wealthy cattleman John Wesley Iliff was moved from Riverside to Fairmount. So was his towering obelisk monument, which had been the centerpiece of Riverside’s landscaping and concentric circular drives. Fairmount, now a necropolis of 175,000 souls, flourishes today, but Riverside had been slowly withering.
Financially strapped Fairmount sought private or public owners to take over the dying cemetery. Many of us hoped it would become a Denver, Adams County or state park.
In August 2008, the Fairmount Heritage Foundation announced the Riverside Revival project, a collaborative effort to develop an environmentally sustainable landscape that would maintain its heritage trees, shrubs and roses with guidance from a Horticulture Advisory Committee.
On April 22, 2009, 12 test plots of native grasses, perennials and groundcovers were planted at Riverside by the Colorado Association of Lawn Care Professionals. CSU master gardeners provided a landscape survey of Riverside’s 77-acre site.
Riverside now boasts 5 acres of groundcover test plots, four CSU plant select demonstration beds, a Heritage Iris Garden, and two native tree and shrub borders.
Riverside Revival, according to Fairmount Heritage Foundation director Patricia Carmody, “is preserving Riverside Cemetery for future generations as an educational resource for everything from history to horticulture.”
Fairmount Heritage sponsors many public tours and educational programs. In collaboration with History Colorado, they are offering a Halloween tombstone tour on Saturday, Oct. 30, 1-4 p.m. which is open to the public. Call History Colorado at 303-866-4686 for reservations.
CU-Denver history professor Tom Noel can be reached at .
