Memorial Day in Leadville, Colorado

Evergreen Cemetery, Leadville, Colorado, Memorial Day, 2011

I spent Memorial Day weekend in historic Leadville, Colorado, in the mountains 120 miles west of Denver. 

If the snowcapped peaks that completely encircle Leadville don’t take your breath away, the altitude will.  At 10,200 feet above sea level, even those of us from the Denver area - only a mile high - occasionally pause to take an extra breath or two.  

By 1880, silver taken from Leadville's mines made rich men of some of its 30,000 residents, including Horace Tabor, whose second marriage to a much younger woman known as Baby Doe was tabloid fodder in the 19^th Century.  

But the residents who caught my attention - and my heart - were the lesser known folks, some nameless, now "inhabiting" Evergreen Cemetery on the edge of town.  Cemeteries provide a fascinating look into the past, and Evergreen is no exception.  Probably a mountain meadow at its founding in 1879, Evergreen Cemetery, appropriately, has been overgrown by a shady, green pine forest.  

A few famous names associated with the town's history are commemorated on headstones at Evergreen, but more intriguing were those recording the deaths of children.  It’s a cliché to say that “Life was hard back then,” but it is no less true for having said it.  In studying the past it's important to remember that early childhood mortality was a fact of life in the 1800s.  

Thomas and Mary Flannery, Irish-Americans judging
from the family names, lost five children to smallpox
in an epidemic in 1883.

Take the case of one Leadville couple, Thomas and Mary Flannery.  According to a stone placed sometime after their own deaths, the Flannerys lost five children to a smallpox epidemic in one year, 1883.  Incredibly, at the time of their deaths, their children ranged in age from one to 21.

(In Europe, at the close of the previous century, smallpox was killing an estimated 400,000 people per year.  After vaccination campaigns throughout the19th and 20th Centuries, the World Health Organization was finally able to certify the eradication of the disease, but not until  1967.)

Headstone art from the 1800s fascinates me.  A common theme for children's markers in Leadville is the tree of life, cut short, of course, by death, with the comforting image of a sleeping child.  At rest. 

A child "rests" beneath the tree of life.
The tree - and the life - cut short and far too early

For me, it was a different kind of Memorial Day.  I hadn't planned on visiting a cemetery...just happened to come upon it. (As most of us will some day, I suppose.)  

My visit to Evergreen Cemetery  gave me the opportunity to reflect on Leadville's past, not only its Silver Barons and celebrities but  also its common folks, like you and me.