mistressofmuses | Entries tagged with cemeteries

On Tuesday there wasn't much we had time to do while out on the plains, since it was a very long drive back. Our target for a quick wander (which conveniently took us past the derailed train we'd wanted a better look at) was the France-Harker Cemetery, listed on the Kiowa County Library site as one of Kiowa county's "lost cemeteries" that they were trying to preserve.

Their directions were... not great.

They were mostly correct, and did take us down the correct zigzag of unpaved county roads, but faltered at the last step. The directions say 3/4 of a mile... it was actually closer to two miles? Two miles isn't that far, but it's significantly farther than 3/4 of a mile, and we u-turned a couple times thinking we must have missed it, trying to track exactly how far we were going. Finally we just shrugged and decided to keep going, and yup. Just a lot farther than advertised.

It's not a large cemetery.

The informative blurb on the library site says it has 21 grave sites, with 10 preserved headstones. The earliest known grave is for Frank Chilson, who died in 1895, and the latest known is Charlie V. France, who died in 1942.

One of the prettiest headstones. "Mattie V., wife of James D. Gordon."

Twelve more pictures:

Blanket flowers, on the way in.

Another pretty headstone, matching the one above, though they have different flowers carved at the top. "James W. Gordon, son of Mattie V and Jas D Gordon."

Paints a sad picture together. Mattie, the woman whose headstone I have above the cut, died just a couple weeks after her son James was born. He lived to just shy of six months.

Another child's grave. "Emma Elizabeth, daughter of D.W. and Mary C. France."

And her parents:

"D.W. France."

"Mary C. France."

"Charlie V. France." This is the last known burial in the cemetery. Though it appears that Lydia (presumably his wife) was intended to be buried here, but wasn't. That always makes me wonder what happened.

There are several of these metal crosses, I assume marking the 11 grave sites that there are not surviving headstones for.

Look at those prickly pear spikes!

Some very impressive spiderwebs in a prickly pear. Quite a protected spot to be!

"Suda, wife of E.J. Henery."

"Chester J., son of E.J. and Suda Henery." (This is the same stone as Suda's, just a different side of the marker.) (Sorry I didn't get my shadow out of the shot.)

"Joseph Kesler."

The oldest known burial in the cemetery. "Frank B. Chilson."

On both our way in and the way back out... COWS.

So many cows on the road! Bella was not sure about this, though she calmed down pretty quick from "deeply concerned" to "simply interested."

Three more pictures of cows:

I like the one with grass hanging out of her mouth, ha.

Several calves, a few cows that looked very pregnant.

Cute white face.

It was nice that we had a chance to at least do something else before heading home, since it's certainly not an area we travel through very often. It was a good weekend in general. We don't often have the chance to go do overnight trips anywhere, but this definitely needed to be; way too far to head out and back in the same day. I'm glad we finally got to go to Sand Creek, tragedy though it is.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

Last Tuesday was the day after we lost Cy. We didn't really... feel like doing anything, but also felt like we *should* do something, rather than just stay home and be sad.

Bella had spent almost all of Monday stuck in her kennel, so we wanted to let her go do things, too.

We decided to go to Matthews/Winters, a county park. It was a good choice: it kept us from dwelling quite so much, and it was a nice day to be outside. It was a park Cy always really liked, because of the creek at the front, and I kept getting teary at random, but it was still good.

View from the parking lot.

There were tons of wildflowers. The lupine is very happy this year!

Twelve more pictures, mostly wildflowers:

Mushrooms!

Matthews/Winters is the site of the Mount Vernon Cemetery. There are only two remaining headstones, though the cemetery likely includes additional burials. As far as I know, there's nothing else remaining of the town.

The helpful informative sign provides a little bit about the two known graves:

James H. Judy, died 1867, aged 21 years, 8 months, 15 days.

Rev. Isaiah Rogers Dean, died in 1860. [Apparently he moved to Colorado to try and treat his consumption (tuberculosis).]

Globemallow.

I love all the new growth on this prickly pear!

Just a nice view.

More of the lovely lupines.

Yucca flower.

Red-tailed hawk, high overhead.

Blanketflower.

Bluebells.

Silly, but I was trying to get a picture of the fritillary butterfly, but here it looks like it was pursuing Alex and Bella down the pathway, haha.

It was a very warm day, and it did wipe Bella out a bit, but she got to wade in the creek at the end, which she was more enthusiastic about than usual. As usual, she napped for a bit and was ready to go again, ha.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

And here is part two of our day at Riverside Cemetery.

I fully expected this one to come out too dark, but it actually turned out just about how it looked:

A bit stern, but I liked the sun backlighting it.

This is the base of the above statue.

( Thirteen more below the cut: )

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: my apartment

On Monday the 10th, when we were at Hudson Gardens, Alex expressed interest in maybe trying to find a small, historic cemetery to visit. It's been a while since we did visit any (and the last time we did go to one of the ones in Denver, Fairmount, Alex was chased away by gnats.)

It's surprisingly hard to find any real small ones here, compared to what he's used to from Maryland, where little family plots were shockingly easy to trip over. (He's even found a few out there that weren't on the county maps of known sites.)

Here we've seen a few—little cemeteries out on the plains that aren't tied to any existing towns, or some of the small ones in the mountains that were tied to mining communities— but a lot of the small ones here have either been entirely lost, or were moved to larger town/city sites.

We did find a couple that sounded maybe interesting, but by the time we did so, it was getting into the afternoon, and we didn't want to spend too long driving somewhere that we might have to hunt around to find the right access to, and such. So we just settled on going back to Riverside, which we hadn't visited in a few years.

Riverside Cemetery is Denver's oldest operational cemetery. It was established in 1876 (the same year Colorado became a state!). It's 77 acres, and has 67000+ burials, though many of those are unmarked. For a long while, it was the choice for the well-to-do of Denver and surrounding areas to bury their loved ones, and there are a ton of prominent local historical figures there. Most of the "notable" burials are politicians, businessmen, socialites, etc.

While we didn't find his grave this time, the most interesting figure to me, personally, is Silas Soule. He was an abolitionist who participated in the Underground Railroad and joined the Union army. He and the men under his command refused to participate in the Sand Creek Massacre, and he later testified at the hearing about the massacre. He was murdered shortly after, in suspected retaliation for his testimony.

The upkeep of the cemetery is a bit... hit or miss. It's certainly not abandoned, and there IS upkeep, but there are also a lot of damaged or fallen stones, and they no longer do any landscaping or much maintenance of the site.

The location is a bit odd now, because it's in a very industrial part of town, with big factory buildings, railyards, and warehouses to most sides. (Though there's also like, a relatively nice administrative building right across from one section.)

A wider shot of a section of the cemetery. It feels a bit weird to me to see the industrial buildings in the background, with the smokestacks and all.

As is often the case with older cemeteries, there are an awful lot of children's graves. This one is pretty elaborate, even if the cherub is damaged. It does give it a bit of an eerie look.

( Fifteen more pictures below the cut: )

Second half of the pictures to come!

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: my apartment

My original hope was that we'd start with one of our farther-away "targets" for a hike or something, but unfortunately, Alex did something ("something" here means "nothing more than walking across the room") and hurt his ankle last night. It was still bothering him pretty badly this morning, so we didn't want to risk either a far-away thing, or anything that cost money, in case we had to turn around and come back.

So we picked one of the nearby cemeteries we'd been wanting to visit: Fairmount.

Fairmount Cemetery is an enormous (280 acre) cemetery in Denver. It was founded in 1890, and is still active. It has some lovely historic markers and above-ground crypts, including some with stained glass. (The Fairmount Mausoleum has a very extensive collection of stained glass, apparently, but we didn't go in there because Cy was with us.) We mostly drove around, getting out when we saw something interesting, both to spare Alex's ankle, and because it was pretty warm, and the dog is a weenie. There were also lots of little gnat-type bugs that mostly left me alone, but were driving Alex nuts.

The Little Ivy Chapel

One of the older crypts. I like the statue on top.

A nice bit of stained glass in a different crypt.

( Thirteen more pictures below the cut, including my favorite stained glass: )

Then we came home and took brief naps. Then went back out to buy crickets for Broccoli Cheddar Bomb, and dinner for us. Alex bought me roses. <3 And then we got home and Cy went ballistic over some raccoons in the drainage ditch. (Raccoons are the ONE thing we have ever found that Cy has a negative-to-the-point-of-aggressive reaction to. He loves other dogs, he honestly barely registers coyotes, he thinks horses and deer look like friends, he loves cats and wants to play with them, he thinks skunks are cats... but he HATES raccoons.)

All in all, a very nice day.

Current Location: my apartment
Current Music: The Demon's Waltz - terrible, boring, Christian production "horror" movie

It is super smokey here. Like, weird sunlight and can't-see-the-mountains-from-my-apartment smokey. Not nearly as bad as it was last summer, when Colorado set and then kept breaking wildfire records (but hey, it's early). Definitely sending good thoughts out to anyone closer to the active fires, which is... most of the western US right now.

But, terrible air quality warnings aside, we still decided to go on a short hike today. This time to another of the county open space parks: Matthews/Winters Park.

A sign at the park entrance. We did NOT see any snakes. I actually haven't seen any snakes or lizards this year. :/

A nice fluffy looking thistle flower.

The first section of the trail has a moderately steep incline, and it did wear me out pretty good. But I'm also a terrible hiking partner by some measures, because I get super sidetracked checking out flowers and bugs and birds, so I wind up moving slowly. Maybe that's why I keep failing to build up endurance, lol.

One little side path leads up to the Mount Vernon Cemetery, which is all that's left of the town of Mount Vernon, which died off after the mines in the area quit producing. There are supposed to be 6 graves in the fenced-off cemetery, though only two are marked.

Years ago when we first went, there were some additional wooden headstones and crosses, though those have since been removed. I'm not sure if they were an informal attempt to mark the other graves, or something like... a film project set.

( 13 more pictures below the cut - cemetery + dog + lots of insects, including a cool/creepy wasp: )

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: my apartment
Current Music: Hellions - horror movie on Hulu

We went to another local cemetery, this time one that's been active since the late 1800s. It was pretty interesting... at least the section we spent the most time in (it's big enough that it'd take days to really go through) seemed to have more Masons and other society members than not. I took a ton of pictures, but didn't have time to upload them tonight; I'll try and do that in the next couple of days.

It was a fun day though, and the last couple days have left me feeling a little less awful about things in general, though we're still in pretty dire straits as far as what to do. Still good to have had a little bit of a mental break from dwelling on it.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: the house
Current Music: Pro Bowl

We did actually get to go out and do things today! We visited Red Rocks park, the Morrison Cemetery, and the Mt. Vernon cemetery. It was really nice to enjoy the recent good weather and to go do something fun!

I posted pictures and more detail at my hiking blog! (Photo posting is a lot easier there.) But please do check it out!

When we got back into town, Alex noticed this on his car's display:

We joked that maybe we should go buy a lottery ticket, haha.

And then we went to a Cuban restaurant that we'd been wanting to try. We split one meal, and it was quite a lot of food (though mid-range in price... too expensive for us to eat often, but certainly not outrageous.) We got saffron rice with chicken, plus plantains, which is their special for Saturdays. I loved all of it, though Alex didn't care for the plantains... so I ate his. :P It was awesome!