The City of Denver condemned the grounds of Mount Prospect Cemetery in 1890 and commissioned their conversion into a public park. Mount Prospect had been Denver’s municipal cemetery since 1858, the year the city itself was founded, and held somewhere between five thousand and six thousand interments accumulated across three decades of frontier settlement, silver boom, and the ordinary mortality of a city growing faster than its civil infrastructure. Families were notified that they had ninety days to arrange the removal of their relatives’ remains to Fairmount Cemetery or another licensed facility. The city would handle unclaimed graves, of which there were many — the transient population of the mining era did not leave families behind to manage paperwork, and a portion of the cemetery’s population had arrived there already unidentified.
The contract for the unclaimed removals was awarded to a private undertaker at a rate per box delivered to the new location. The structure of the payment — per box, per unit, without specification of what a unit must contain — created an incentive that the contractor interpreted with considerable latitude. Eyewitness accounts collected by Denver newspapers in 1893, when the scandal broke into public view, described workers at the site disarticulating remains and packing multiple sets of bones into single boxes to maximize the count; fragments left in the ground when a body had been buried too long or too deep to recover efficiently; and coffins delivered to Fairmount that contained portions of several different people mixed without identification. The contract required boxes delivered, not persons transferred, and the contractor had read the contract carefully.
The Jewish community of Denver had organized the removal of their section independently, pooling resources to hire their own crews under rabbinical supervision, and their section of the cemetery was moved with relative completeness. The Protestant and Catholic sections, the paupers’ ground, and the section containing those buried without religious affiliation relied on the city contract. It was these sections that produced the accounts of partial remains, of graves found empty with no transfer record, of boxes at Fairmount that opened to reveal an assemblage of fragments rather than a person. The property notices and auction listings from Denver real estate in 1891 and 1892 make no reference to the removal operations underway beneath the surface of what would become one of the city’s desirable residential districts, because the connection between the two was not public knowledge until the 1893 reporting.
The city’s response to the scandal was administrative rather than prosecutorial. The contractor was not charged with any crime, because the contract had not legally required what the public assumed it had required, and the legal distinction between inadequate performance of a burial contract and criminal desecration of remains was ambiguous enough in Colorado law of the period to make prosecution uncertain. A new contractor was engaged to conduct a supplementary survey and recover additional remains; that survey was itself incomplete, and the city health board that oversaw it filed a report that certified the work done without specifying how much remained undone. The park opened. The botanical garden section opened. The obituary records for families who attempted to relocate relatives from Mount Prospect in the early 1890s include a recurring notation: “remains not located.”
Denver in the 1890s was a city in the process of becoming something larger and more permanent than the camp it had started as, and that process required converting frontier-era ground — the graves, the clay lots, the old commercial sites — into civic infrastructure. The conversion at Cheesman Park was the most consequential of these operations and the least carefully managed. The death records in this archive’s correspondence files for the Mount Prospect period contain multiple entries where the transfer notation is blank or marked uncertain, representing people interred in one location whose current resting place cannot be determined from any available documentation. The park is well-maintained and heavily used. The documentation is not well-maintained and not used at all.