![]() She has dug through newspaper archives, marriage certificates, and other clerk and recorder records to figure out where people buried at the cemetery came from and how their journey ended, she said. “Because really, to understand our community today, you kind of need to understand how (and) why they formed it.” “I started digging for their stories and figuring out who they were, how they were involved with the founding of our community,” she said. She said this year is the greenest she’s seen the area. Julie Pickett, a member of Friends of the Animas Cemetery, has spent countless hours walking its rows of marked and unmarked graves. The cemetery in north Durango is lush with vegetation. The cemetery was fairly well researched as far as names and dates of the people buried there, thanks to the late Henry Ninde, but she realized the dead had so many untold stories waiting to be unearthed.Īnimas City Mountain sits across the valley from Animas City Cemetery. Ever since she was a child she had been fascinated by cemeteries, and she had an interest in genealogy. Pickett became involved with Friends of the Animas City Cemetery in 2008. Once planted, they spread like rhizomes or grasses, and were placed around graves in the cemetery long ago. Iris flowers, vibrant but hardy and drought-tolerant plants found in bunches across the cemetery, are dead giveaways of unmarked graves, Ruth Lambert, another friend of the cemetery, said. There are 65 gravestones with 75 names recorded among them at the cemetery and more than 100 unmarked graves, and it is possible more unknown graves are out there, said Julie Pickett, a member with Friends of the Animas City Cemetery.Ībout 37%, or 54 graves, belong to children, which is an indicator of the high mortality rate of the late 1800s, according to data she compiled several years ago. The Animas City Cemetery was established in 1876 and is the final resting place of many area residents’ ancestors, among them Civil War veterans, outlaws, entire families and children. When looking for graves in the Animas City Cemetery, iris flowers can signal where a grave might be located. Friends of the Animas City Cemetery, an advocacy and research group committed to studying the site’s buried secrets, contends that more needs to be done to conserve the oldest cemetery in La Plata County. ![]() But there are no planned formal preservation efforts by the city, which is the official steward of the site. ![]() The city of Durango’s Planning Commission ultimately denied the proposal from developer J Street Cos., and neighbors rejoiced. Residents were worried that with no gates, fencing or formal borders of any kind, the dense development, called the Sophia Apartments, would lead to intrusions on the cemetery, risking degradation of the headstones and graves and the place’s history. When a 200-unit apartment complex was proposed in March for the 900 block of Florida Road adjacent to the Animas City Cemetery, a solemn historic 5-acre burial site south of North College Drive, area residents rallied to protect the boneyard. Area residents felt the cemetery was threatened by a recent development proposal and rallied to shut down the project or limit its scope. Julie Pickett, left, and Ruth Lambert, with Friends of the Animas City Cemetery, look over a gravesite within an enclosure Tuesday in north Durango. ![]()
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