Weekend at Riverside Cemetery

Life can be full of unique opportunities, if you put a little work into it. I spent last weekend at Riverside Cemetery, Denver's oldest, attending a gravestone conservation and cleaning workshop. What an experience!

Pretty much everyone who had a hand in Colorado's pioneer and territory days is buried at Riverside. The cemetery is located in what is now an industrial part of town called Globeville. The cemetery had become largely neglected over the years, and the revocation of its water rights in 2002 has desiccated nearly all the vegetation, including the trees. In fact, Colorado Preservation recently cited Riverside as one of Colorado's most endangered places.

Fortunately, things are beginning to look up. The Friends of Historic Riverside Cemetery brought in Jayne Uhlir, a specialist in stone sculpture and architecture, to teach last weekend's workshop. Jayne gave us a general overview of the significance of cemeteries and ended the day with a demonstration of proper gravestone assessment and cleaning techniques.

One of the profound realizations I gained from the class was how important cemeteries are as places of solitude in urban areas. If you take a walk and visit some of Riverside's wonderful crypts along the Platte River by yourself, you'll quickly learn why.

On Sunday, about a dozen of us braved 90 degree heat to assess and clean about 50 markers. I became expert (at least in my estimation) at measuring various features of the stones. It was fascinating to contemplate the countless stone designs and inscriptions.

During a break, I asked one of Riverside's regular volunteers if I could see the cemetery's archives. And what luck—all of the original internment records and plot maps are intact. Since then, I have been thinking about ways in which that information could be digitized and made meaningful to a wider audience. The old ledgers are in really rough shape, but are nothing a good book conservator couldn't make look pretty again.

Hugh Graham, who writes an excellent blog on topics related to design (in addition to being Riverside's webmaster), expressed an interest in collecting GPS coordinates for the plots and making those available online. Another volunteer told me about the searchable cemetery database she's building for researchers. Perhaps I'll lend a hand with some of these projects...

The best thing about the weekend was working with a group of people who were passionate about preserving this fantastic place. I believe photos from the workshop will be posted on the Friends site soon.