Denver riverside cemetery

Three civil war Medal of Honor recipients are among those buried in the military cemetery. The threats currently facing the cemetery are significant and compounding. The historic landscape has suffered a staggering loss of plantings without supplemental irrigation to augment the low natural precipitation of the region. Turfgrass is all but gone from the property, leaving only weeds and patches of native grass as the primary groundcover. Over the fall and winter of , several dead trees fell and damaged nearby monuments and a historic private mausoleum.

Many more were taken down to manage this risk, but additional trees are in danger of falling during future storms or periods of strong winds.

Riverside is the final resting place of a variety of people; from poor to affluent and from the simple to the famous; some merely passing through time, some leaving their mark on history.

Riverside is located at: Brighton Blvd. Please join me often as I strive to create the best memorial site in the Country. Over time, however, few of the zinc headstones have been adequately maintained. The cemetery features a few buildings that are still standing. The Old Stone House, as it is known by staff, is a mysterious limestone dwelling on the property. It is unclear if it was originally built for the purposes of the cemetery, but it was used in the late nineteenth century as a secondary office and holding site for burials.

It has been boarded up since By that time, the Fairmount Cemetery Company had purchased Riverside. Fairmount hired prominent local architect Frank Edbrooke to design an office and chapel space on the grounds, which was completed in May Riverside is home to a diverse group of people. The grounds are also home to businesswomen such as Augusta Tabor and activists such as Sadie Likens the first prison matron in Colorado.

The cemetery accepted different groups for burial before other cemeteries around the state. Riverside is also known for its graves for Civil War veterans. More than 1, Civil War veterans are buried at Riverside, many of them unidentified. Riverside Cemetery was founded by a like-minded group of locals, not an endowment, institution, or government. By the s, Riverside was starting to lose its status to the new Fairmount Cemetery on the southeast side of Denver.

In the Fairmount Cemetery Company purchased Riverside to save it from financial demise. Riverside was reduced from its original acres to Many families, who knew how much status meant to their loved ones, exhumed their relatives and moved them to Fairmount. In June , Riverside became the first local cemetery to have a crematory.

This service brought a brief resurgence of business before several other crematories opened in Denver by It fell victim to industrialization along the river north of Denver. The cemetery became surrounded by refineries and railroad tracks. Its view of the mountains was obstructed, and weeds crept into the paths. The Fairmount Cemetery Company, which still owned Riverside, lost a court battle with the new water owners in the s, then lost an appeal against Denver Water in The cemetery struggled to keep up its landscaping and faced property-line disputes involving graves close to the riverbank.

Annual burials declined until Riverside stopped burials entirely in Developers have been eyeing the cemetery since the s, sometimes spreading false rumors that it was abandoned. These rumors caused the Fairmount Cemetery Company to focus more attention on upkeep and public awareness of Riverside. In the cemetery was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The Fairmount Heritage Foundation, founded in , and Friends of Riverside Cemetery, formed in , now advocate for the cemetery and provide necessary services.

Members remove dead trees and regularly check on the grounds, water flowers, and clean graves. Would you prefer to share this page with others by linking to it? Click on the HTML link code below. Copy and paste it, adding a note of your own, into your blog, a Web page, forums, a blog comment, your Facebook account, or anywhere that someone would find this page valuable. Copyright - HauntedHovel. The privacy policy of the Haunted Hovel regarding general information is to not reveal any personal contact information of any submitting parties to the site.

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