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FAIRMOUNT CEMETERY SCULPTURE WALKING TOUR
HISTORIC SCULPTURES AND ROSES
(430 S. Quebec Street near East Alameda Avenue)
Fairmount is Colorado’s most populous cemetery and a
peaceful place to study history and architecture. Fairmount’s founders promised to
abandon the "mournful effects of the old style cemetery" for the rural cemetery
park style initiated at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1890, German
architect Reinhard Schuetze was hired to do the job. He planted more than 4,000 trees in
Fairmount, which is still the state’s largest and most diverse arboretum. Schuetze,
the state’s first landscape architect subsequently designed or redesigned many Denver
parks.
Many well known Coloradans dwell in this necropolis, where
a number erected obelisks and Greek-temple mausoleums as their final earthly homes.
The sculpture tour of funerary architecture is recommended.
Pick up an informative tour booklet at the entrance. It will guide you around an
inner-circle route of 10 burial blocks studded with some of the more notable memorial
edifices installed in this beautiful city of the dead, including (in tour order):
Sculptures and Descriptions
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Block 2 (Benson)
Neoclassical-style mouning urn, draped
with a weeper’s handkerchief.
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Block 63 (Iliff)
Massive heroic sculpture of a classically
dressed weeper once stood at the center of Riverside Cemetery. It was moved here
in the early 1900s.
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Block 5 (Kaub)
White marble busts are protected inside a
plexiglass-encased memorial display.
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Block 1 (Ross)
This Gothic-revival shrine tomb has white
marble busts inset in red granite.
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Block 12 (Williams)
Throughout the park are these partially completed memorials (for partially
completed lives) adorned with ferns, torches,cornstalks and other funerary
symbols defined in the guidebook.
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Block 9 (Yates)
One-of-a-kind, Romanesque shrine-tomb
complete with roof and columns skillfully clad in sheets of copper.
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Block 16 (Wight)
Greek exedra-style memorial with built-in
art deco benches to accommodate weary mourners.
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Block D (Good)
A stylized Italian renaissance tomb
reminiscent of Roman circular temples.
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By the way:
In addition to the beautiful and rare tree plantings at Fairmount (for which you
can pick up a separate tour brochure ate the gate), the cemetery also is renown
among amateur and professional horticulturalists for the many old and mostly
unidentified antique garden rose varieties planted by families of deceased
relatives buried there. Rosarian, hybridizer, and garden writer John Starnes
maintains an online listing of the many rare (and some unknown)
rose varieties
growing there. He also leads annual rose tours of the cemetery each June.
Also recommended:
Riverside Cemetery (5200 Brighton Boulevard at Welby Road)
Colorado’s oldest cemetery features a five-foot-high
limestone replica of the log cabin of miner Lester Drake. Many other intriguing old
markers survive in this eerie boneyard left behind by progress.
Additional Resources
For more information about Fairmont and Riverside Cemeteries, contact the
Western History/Genealogy Department of the
Denver Public Library, and the
Colorado History Museum.
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