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Ute Cemetery
Aspen, Pitkin County, Colorado

GPS: 39.182360, -106.812774

Ute Ave
Aspen, CO 81611

Published: August 15, 2016
Total records: 114

Ute Cemetery is owned and maintained by the City of Aspen.

History

Ute Cemetery traces it's earliest history to June 1880, when a prospector from Texas named "Colonel Kirby" died in Aspen, succumbing to mountain fever. He was buried in a privately owned vacant field southeast of town. Others began burying their dead there. It eventually became known as, "Evergreen Cemetery".

Sometime around 1900, and certainly by 1905, Evergreen Cemetery became known as Ute Cemetery, possibly connecting it to the nearby Ute Spring, Ute Avenue, or the town of Aspen's short-lived but original name, Ute City.

By 1935, only 700 people remained in Aspen and the town looked as if it was bound for obscurity. During the Depression years, just one burial is known to have taken place at Ute Cemetery, and over the following four decades the site saw just two more. With Aspen's resurgence as a ski-resort town, there were no longer any surviving family members to care for graves at Ute Cemetery. During the 1960s and 1970s, possibly due to its abandoned state, some of the headstones disappeared (occasionally turning up in local antique shops) and others were broken by vandals.

Finally, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with historic preservation a high priority in Aspen, the city initiated a process of studying the cemetery. It launched initiatives to clean up and rebuild it with historic integrity. In 2002, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Cemetery Records

Of the approximately 175 graves found at Ute Cemetery, about 75 are marked with monuments that provide information about whose remains were placed there. Although these markers date from the early 1880s through the 1930s, most of them were erected between 1882 and 1900.

• Ute Cemetery, Master List of Recorded Burials (13 pages, 2.45 MB)
• Ute Cemetery, Application for National Register of Historic Places (23 pages, 3.55 MB)