THE HISTORY OF COSTILLA COUNTY AS REVEALED BY ITS CEMETERIES
MASTER
OF ARTS THESIS BY HAZEL PETTY
On one side of the river lies the village of San
Pablo and on the other side is San Pedro.
Even the residents seem confused as to which one is which. The Post Office is called San Pablo but the
postmaster believes it is located in San Pedro.
The oldest cemetery for this area was probably one
on which the home of Mr. and Mrs. Alfonso Manzanares is built. They dug up many graves in that area when
they were building their house.
There is some evidence of another cemetery (which
is probably a later one) to the east of this.
It was located across from the Havana Night Club which was burned
down. Several residents mentioned this
fact when discussing this cemetery.
When the highway was oiled, most of the bodies were moved to the San
Pedro Cemetery, which is located north on the brow of a hill.
Two old timers expressed the opinion that San Pablo
was settled before San Luis. Alfonso
Manzanares stated his uncle was born in San Pablo in 1856 in a large house so
he believes they had lived there quite some time. Mr. Manzanares found a 44-caliber gun in that same house that was
an army gun issued in 1840.
In the newer cemetery on the hill, the oldest
marked grave is that of Juan Cristoval – born in 1804 and died in 1882 – which
has a very ornate marker on it.
This cemetery is divided: one part is Roman Catholic; the other Presbyterian. There has been a very active Presbyterian
Church in San Pablo since missionaries came to this area in 1889. On of the Presbyterian side of cemetery
there are about twenty-five graves.
These are all less than 10 years old.
There are three family cemeteries of Presbyterian families in this area
which are reviewed in another chapter.
On the Roman Catholic side, J. M. Pacheco and his
wife, Isabel, are buried. In the 1899
Business Directory, he is listed as owning a general merchandise store. Another general merchandise store owner and
also postmaster in 1899, Jose E. Sanchez and his wife are buried here. Another stone has engraved on it “Mis
Muchachitos” 1881 – 1883, meaning “My sons.”
LA VALLEY
The church at La Valley is called San Francisco. As is so true in many instances, the
cemetery is located on a hillside. It
is fenced by a good fence. The oldest
marked grave is that of Margarito Taylor, who was one month old when he died.
JESUS ONLY CEMETERY
Just below the forks of the Culebra River, there is
a small, fenced cemetery with twenty-six graves in it. It is west of the Culebra Canyon Catholic
Church and Canyon School on the highway which was started to go over Whiskey
Pass. The only marker in this “Jesus
Only” Cemetery is that of Juan B. Maes, born in 1883 and died in 1956.
LOS FUERTES
Another cemetery which has a fence dividing the
Catholic and Protestant sides is that of Los Fuertes. The church was called San Isidoro because he was patron saint of
the church, but the village and cemetery are called Los Fuertes.
One Pioneer said that the creek running through
this village is called Vallejos and the community is Los Fuertes but very often
they us the names interchangeably.
The oldest grave on the Protestant side is a 1925
grave. Some of the newer burials were
the Manzanares children who all died on March 16, 1964. According to residents of the area, all five
children burned to death in a fire in Pueblo.
Their parents had gone to a party and left them alone. The oldest, Carolyn, was seven; Josephine
was six; Leo, five; Kenneth, four; and Billy, three.
EASTDALE
One of the older settlements on the mesa was
Eastdale, it was established by some Mormon families looking for a place to
settle around 1890. Water rights were
filed and waters from the Costilla River and the Culebra River were utilized to
irrigate 3,890 acres.
Eastdale had a one-teacher schoolhouse, a grocery
store and post office, which was located in the home of postmaster, Simeon A.
Dun, who has relatives now living in Alamosa, and a church built of brick which
they made themselves. They made the
brick of adobe and then fired them until they became brick.
The cemetery land was controlled by the Corporate
Eastdale Land Canal and Reservoir Company which was formed on April 28, 1890,
and filed on May 2, 1890. The directors
of this corporation were Christen Jensen, The Bishop of the Mormon Church,
Simeon A. Dunn, the postmaster, and William T. Morris.
The grave which has the earliest dated marker is
Nettie C. Jensen, wife of Bishop Jensen, which is dated 1891
A marker placed in a fenced plot which bears the
name Parrish. He was the son of Mr. and
Mrs. William Parrish who lived in San Luis and ran the flourmill there. The child died shortly after birth because
the valve of his heart did not close properly.
Those pioneers who lived in Eastdale recall the
many good times that were held in the short-lived community. On the Fourth of July and the Twenty-fourth
of July, which is a Mormon celebration day, community picnics were held when
people could gather, play different games and eat. There was always plenty of food.
Mrs. Charles Wilson recalls going by wagon to the box canyon of the Rio Grande
to pick currants and choke cherries from which jelly and jam were made.
Mrs. Leonard Haynie remembers milking cows and
churning butter and taking it to Costilla to sell.
The community existed about nineteen years. A land development company bought all the
land and by orders of the Mormon Church, the settlers were told to move.
Some migrated to Manassa – others to Sanford and it
is not remembered where the rest went to live.
All that remains are a few broken down shacks and a
cemetery with about twenty graves – some well cared for, others sorely
neglected.
After the Mormons left some people moved into their
vacant farms. One early settler recalls a family named Hurianic living in
Eastdale. Their children walked the
eight miles to Jarosa to attend school.
One of the daughters is now a Doctor of Medicine
Also, during WWII, some of these farms were
occupied by Japanese-Americans who had been displaced by the Government from
their homes on the West Coast. Some of
these citizens live in the San Luis Valley today.
JAROSA
Because there was plenty of water available from
the two reservoirs that the Mormon settlers in Eastdale had built and the San
Luis Valley Southern Railroad had been built to Jarosa in 1909-1910, the Shedd
Investment Company of Omaha, NB, started a land development in the Jarosa area. It was reserved for Seventh Day Adventists
and was well planned. The main street
was named Costilla Avenue and the Academy and Industrial Farm were included in
the plans. People began to settle in 1914
and 1915. The Martin Adsons were
farmers who came from Norway to Iowa and then to Jarosa in 1915. They are now buried in Jarosa. While the Seventh Day Adventist Church was
being built in Jarosa, the Jarosa residents would load students and teachers into
a wagon and take them to a church the Mormons had used in Eastdale for religious
services.
The Industrial Farm covered 160 acres. A large barn was built in 1915 and two large
silos were constructed.
A carpenter shop was built and students planned the
lumber for other buildings completing the Academy in 1919.
At it’s peak, the Academy had seventy
students. The “golden days of Jarosa”
were from 1921 to 1923 when there were four dry goods and grocery stores, a
blacksmith shop and garage, two hotels, a bank and a post office. After the war the price of wheat dropped and
many farmers went broke. The last year
of the Academy was 1925 –1926. A church
school to the eighth grade remained until 1933.
The first person buried in the Jarosa cemetery
northwest of Jarosa was Jay Donald Chaffin, who was drowned in the Eastdale
Reservoir while hunting ducks. He was
buried in 1914. In 1915 a Myrtle Kinder
was buried there.
Until August 29, 1916 the land where the cemetery
is located belonged to the Costilla Estate Development Company. At that time the Mountain View Cemetery
Association was formed with Emma O. Hammond as president. The Hammonds started the store and
lumberyard at Jarosa.
Some time ago, John Hill picked up all unsold real
estate from the Costilla Estate Development Company and among them was the deed
to the cemetery. About 1950 John Hill
returned the deed to the cemetery to the Jarosa Community
There were two tragedies the pioneers of Jarosa recall. One was the death of George Lyle Barker, who
was ice-skating on the Eastdale Reservoir and drowned. The other was the tragic death of three-
year- old Freda Sersain who was playing with matches in a pigpen of straw. The straw burned so fast that the girl could
not get out, although her brother escaped.
The Jarosa residents recall with affection Dr. and
Mrs. J. N. Medill who were the family doctor and his wife. They remember that Dr. Medill would pick
them up in the winter in his sleigh and take them to school.
There were many graves of people who died in 1918
and 1919 during the flu epidemic.
Several of the Silas Romero children died of flu and in 1931 Silas was
killed by lightening when driving a tractor.
Mrs. Martha White Lainson is buried here. Mr. Lainson was a carpenter who built the
Hammond and Medill homes and many others.
Buried in Jarosa cemetery are many residents of
Sunshine Valley which is located a few miles south of Jarosa in New Mexico.
The father and mother of Senator Carter of New
Mexico are buried here.
Outsiders who would visit this town which still has
the store and post office run by the son of early Jarosa settlers, Mr. and Mrs.
Fred Anderson, would not be able to tell what a thriving community Jarosa one
was.
MESITA
The best marked public cemetery of Costilla County
that the author visited was that of Mesita.
According to the Mesita Cemetery plat which was
prepared on December 21, 1915 in San Acacio, the first president of the Mesita
Cemetery Association was A. J. Barnes and the secretary was E. T. Childs. The
plat also states that the west line of the cemetery is fifty feet east of the
San Luis Southern Railroad.
The author examined the certificate of corporation
which was issued on September 14, 1915 and the deed to the land which is dated
March 19, 1917; also the minutes of the Association when is was organized on
September 1, 1915 and subsequent meetings in 1916, 1917 and 1922 at which time
the Cemetery Association was turned over to the women of the community.
J. Barnes and William Barnes, brothers, were early
settlers of Mesita. William Barnes’s wife and grandson are buried here
The reason the Mesita cemetery is so well marked is
because the Columbine Community Club (which is a group of civic minded women)
several years ago decided to mark all the graves in the cemetery. They hired Louis Regneir to make cement
markers on all the graves that were not marked, and to print the names on
them. Ironically, he is buried here and
his grave is one of the few that are not marked. One resident recalls that on Memorial Day of each year, the
community would get together and have a basket dinner at the Old Mesita Hall
and the men would work at the cemetery – cleaning, fixing fence, etc. She recalls that the practice ceased about
1934 or 1935. Then in 1944 they started
again and grass was planted. A man was
hired to water the trees and grass. The
following year more trees were planted and the watering continued. In 1949, there was such a water shortage
that the trees and grass were not watered and they have not had a clean-up day
since then. Those five years when the
community was active, each family which had lots in the cemetery was asked to
donate $2.50 for expenses.
Mesita was one of the three towns developed under
the Costilla Estate Development Company.
The San Luis Southern Railway serviced this part of the San Luis
Valley. It went to the state line, but
not into New Mexico. At one time Mesita
has several stores, a stone schoolhouse, which now serves as a storage place, a
church and other businesses. After a
slump when almost everyone left Mesita, it has again become a bustling place of
business for the hill of rock at the west edge of Medita, which at one time was
just a place to climb and play, has become an industry called Colorado
Aggregate Co., Inc. They furnish
volcanic rock for ground coverings and furnish ninety-five percent of the rock
used by gas barbecue grill companies.
This company is owned by George Oringdolph and
Henry Quiller, who were raised in this community.
There are several Quiller graves in the
cemetery. Edna Quiller was Henry’s
mother. She was a schoolteacher and
everyone in the community called her “Grandma Quiller” because she was so “good
hearted.”
There are three Crounk graves. Orey Crounk was born May 1, 1919. He served in WW II and was captured and
spent some time in a concentration camp.
When he came home after the War he was nothing but skin and bones and
showed the mistreatment of the concentration camp. In 1950 he went for an airplane ride and it crashed and burned
and he was killed. The Cummings grave
was that of a man who was running a hand-operated elevator in a store and it
crashed and killed him.
There are several residents of San Acacio buried
here because San Acacio had no cemetery.
Four graves of Japanese residents who were buried between 1925 and 1928
are believed to have lived in San Acacio.
There are two graves of the Metcalf children. The first one to be buried was Bert B. in
1914. He was one year old and had been
playing on the kitchen floor. His
mother had a teakettle and thought she had put it on the stove safely. Bert grabbed his mother’s skirts and in
reaching to pick him up, she knocked the teakettle off and the hot water
scalded the baby to death.
A sister of Fred Holmes helped care for the mother
for quite some time because she went crazy with grief. Then in 1916 the older boy, Dwane, who was
five, died of bowel obstruction. The
Metcalf’s buried the second boy on a mesa and were so grief stricken they moved
to Albuquerque. About a year later,
they returned and disinterred the bodies and moved them to the Mesita cemetery
THE CIVILIAN CEMETERY ON UTE CREEK
Before Fort Garland was abandoned, civilians were
not allowed to live on the six-mile square which was the military
reservation.
Therefore, a settlement grew up on the north edge
of the reservation. The cemetery is
located west of the Ute Creek.
Emmett Calkins, who lives on the ranch where the
cemetery is located, remembers seeing the cemetery when he was younger. At that time it was overrun with “buck
bush.” It was surrounded by a wooden
fence and had some wooden crosses then.
There was one fenced plot within the cemetery. It was surrounded by barbed wire. Some time later a fire swept the hillside and all that is left
are the rocks that covered some of the graves.
Mr. Calkins estimates there were between twenty and thirty graves.
Since the Calkins discovered the cemetery, large
trees have grown which were not there when they found it.
Louis Medina, age 79, who has been a cowboy for
sixty-fie years and still rides everyday, remembers seeing a man buried in that
cemetery. The man had not wanted to be
buried in a coffin, so the family took the corpse into the grave by ladder and
made a place for his head so that when the dirt was thrown in the grave, it
would not fall in his face.
About a hundred yards from the civilian cemetery, a
headstone was discovered in the corner of the field with the date of 1660. The Smithsonian Institution believes it was
the burial place of a padre. The
headstone is now preserved at the Fort Garland Museum.
It is know that there were white men in this region
as early as 1598 when the peace of the Indians was disturbed by Juan de Onate.
SOLDIERS CEMETERY
On the hill east of the Julia Brennaman cemetery
just east of For Garland, there was a cemetery where the soldiers and their
families were buried. When the fort was
abandoned in 1883 following the removal of the Ute Indians to Utah, the army
removed the bodies of the soldiers and took them to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. They brought a railroad car in and put the
bodies on it and took them by train.
All that is left in the cemetery now are the graves
of two of the children of Henry and Mary Meder. A daughter, Emma, of J. C. and M. Snodgrass who died in 1886, the
year of the epidemic.
It is believed that the father of Johnny Lewis is
buried there, but there is no marked grave.
A microfilm from the National Archives in
Washington, D. C. does not tell of any deaths of the soldiers from June 1852 to
July 1858.
THE MacMULLAN CEMETERY
The citizens around Fort Garland call this cemetery
the MacMullan cemetery. Although they
are not sure why it is called this, one resident believes it received the name
when the MacMullan children died during an epidemic and were among the first to
be buried in this cemetery. The writer
did find four graves that were older than that of the MacMullan children.
One was Maria de los Reyes who was the wife of
Charles Newton, a veteran of the Mexican War, who came to this community in
1861 and settled on Ute Creek. The
raised hay, grain, vegetables and beef and sold them to the Fort. Mrs. Newton was buried in the cemetery in
1883 when she was fifty years old.
Another burial prior to the MacMullan burials was a
T. Stewart who was born in Ireland in 1815 and was buried in 1880.
Annie M. Brown was buried in the cemetery in 1885
at the age of twenty-four. The other
burial prior to 1886 was that of a four-year old girl named Lizzie, who was
buried in 1885. She was one of a number
of children of the T. L. Wilcoxan family who are buried along with the mother,
Agnes. Two children named Agnes (one
just one day old), Baltus (also one day old), consist of six children who all
died at different times from 1885 to 1890.
The burials which evidently prompted the
townspeople to call it the MacMullan cemetery were the MacMullan children who
all died within five days in December, 1886.
William was five and died on December 2; Rachel, 10 on December 4;
Dominic was three and passed away on the 5th; Annie, eight, died on
December 8. The children’s father was
Charles P. MacMullan who was born in Ireland.
He received his classical education in Dublin. Shortly after graduating, he came to St. Louis in the United
States where he invested his inherited capital in a business enterprise which
proved to be a failure. At the opening
of the Civil War he enlisted in the Union Army where he served as hospital
steward most of the time. After the war
he was transferred to Fort Garland where he resigned in 1871. Mr. MacMullan married Jennie (Jane) Hutton
who lived with an Aunt after her father died in Pennsylvania when she was
three. The aunt with whom she lived was
Hannah Thompson, wife Capt. James Thompson, who was commanding officer of his
company in Fort Garland. After the
MacMullans were married, Mr. MacMullan had charge of a store for Ferd
Meyer. In 1883 he turned his attention
to the practice of medicine which he followed for some years. He established a general mercantile business
which also handled produce. He served
as postmaster, county commissioner and county superintendent of schools. He was known throughout the valley as a man
of integrity and unblemished character.
After Mr. MacMullan’s death in 1895, his widow became postmaster and ran
his business.
Another illustrious pioneer buried in MacMullan
cemetery is Tom Tobin. Tobin was born
in St. Louis, MO around 1822 and came west when he was fifteen or sixteen years
old where he soon met Kit Carson and became one of Carson’s scouts.
He made Taos his home until he was married in 1845
to Pascuala Vernal of Arroyo Hondo, NM.
It was here that in 1847, the revolt against United States Citizens
occurred. Tobin’s mother-in-law hid him
in a grain bin and his oldest son, Marcisso, who was just a baby at that time,
in an abandoned chimney so they escaped death.
In 1862, Tobin came to Fort Garland, squatting on the Trinchera
River. Because there was no school or
church at Fort Garland, it is thought that Tom’s family would move to the
homestead on the Trinchera in the spring and then return after the crops were
gathered to their home in Costilla where there was a church and school.
It was in September of 1863 that Colonel Tappan of
Fort Garland sent Tom to track down the Espinoza outlaws. The Espinoza’s had committed many atrocities
as far north as Colorado Springs. Tobin
took a boy from his ranch with him.
They found the trail and eventually the camp. Tom told the boy to stay a short distance away and if he did not
return in two hours to ride as fast as he could to Fort Garland. Tobin shot the Espinoza’s and decided to cut
their heads off to prove that he had accomplished his mission.
It was twilight when he got to the fort with the
sack containing the heads. When Colonel
Tappan came to his headquarters, he rolled the heads on the floor and to the
Colonel’s question, “What luck did you have?” answered that he guessed his luck
had been pretty good.
Tobin sold his Costilla property to Ferd Meyer and
moved his family permanently to the Trinchera in 1872. He helped to organize School District #3 of
Costilla County and served for a time as President of the Board. Because he had not known how to write his
name and he had to sign the checks for teachers, he had his wife teach him how
to sign his name.
He raised horses and cattle and was fond of horse
racing. His grandson, Kit Carson III,
recalls people used to come from as far as NM to bet on Tobin’s horses. Sometimes they would bet everything they
had. Every year some of the Ute Indians
from Ignacio would come to the Tobin ranch and camp. They would give the Tobin children trinkets and the Tobin’s would
feed them. Perhaps it was the fact that
the Tobin’s were generous that kept them from being attacked by the Utes. Kit Carson’s son, William married Tobin’s
youngest daughter, Pasquala. Tobin’s
first wife died in 1886 and is buried in the MacMullan cemetery and Tobin was
buried beside her in 1904 after a simple funeral held at this home.
On the gravestones, Tom’s headstone is marked
Thomas T. Toben. His wife’s stone is
marked Maria Pasuala Tobens. Most of
the written information spells it Tobin.
Different people have varied recollections of Tom Tobin. Luis Medina recalls that his father took him
to see Tobin because he talked rough, he was afraid of him, but Tom gave him
some spurs and he soon grew to like him.
Kit Carson III, his grandson, emulates respect and love when speaking of
his grandfather Tobin.
Another grave in the MacMullan cemetery is that of
Clarke Brennaman, who a brother of Ed and Seward Brennaman. A niece, Gladys Robinson, recalls that Clark
Brennaman turned his leg and bruised it.
He told Seward that he couldn’t make it home so he stayed at Seward’s
home. A blood vessel broke and by
morning he had blood poisoning and died shortly thereafter.
In one of Fort Garland’s cemeteries, an Indian
slave girl named Refugio is buried.
Many of the people had Indian slaves.
Refugio married an army lieutenant at the fort. The Tobin information states that they also
had an Indian slave.
Another person buried in this cemetery is the
son-in-law of Tom Tobin, William Carson.
William was the son of Kit Carson and Josefa Jaramillo. After Kit and Josefa died in 1868, the
Carson children were taken by relatives and friends to be raised. William was 16 and was taken by Kit’s good
friend, General William Sherman, to Indiana to go to school. When he was 20 he came west and lived at the
home of his father’s good friend, Tom Tobin, and he later married Tom’s
daughter, Pasquala. He punched cattle
on the Medano Ranch and later became sheriff.
Kit Carson III, his son, remembers his father’s untimely death in this
way: The county seat was located at San
Luis and Sheriff Carson had been there on this certain day. The Carson family lived in the northwest
section of Fort Garland. Sheriff Carson
unhitched his team on the other side of the stream and went behind the stable
to get some hay. The horses were
drinking when he returned with a pitchfork loaded with hay he did not notice
that one of the horses had entered the stable.
When the sheriff entered the door the pitchfork hit the horse and the
horse kicked, hitting the loaded pistol in the sheriff’s holster. The bullet entered the sheriff’s leg and
lodged in his kneecap. The closest
doctor was in Alamosa and by the time the doctor got there the next day, blood
poisoning had set in. The doctor told
the sheriff he would have to remove the leg.
The sheriff proclaimed he would “not be half a man” and refused to let
him amputate, and so ended the life of the oldest son of Kit Carson.
BILLY MEYTER CEMETERY
It is believed that Billy Meyer started the Meyer
Cemetery which is located west of the North Trinchera headquarters and at the
foot of the Mesa where the MacMullan cemetery is located. One of the old timers, Abe Gonzales,
believes there was a Meyer child buried there although the author could find no
headstone marked for one. There were many unmarked graves in this cemetery so
one could have been buried there. Mr.
Gonzales believes the reason for starting this cemetery was that the MacMullan
Cemetery on the brow of the hill could not be reached in winter because of the
snow in the Sand Creek ravine, and in the summer, the water had the road washed
out. There are approximately one
hundred thirty seven graves in this cemetery.
The first grave that was marked was 1918, and the last one marked is
1959.
PLACER
About 1869 there was mining excitement in the
Greyback area in the northeast part of the County. As a result, Placer sprang up.
The prospects were not as rich as at first thought and the settlement
declined, but grew again when the railroad went through in 1877 and 1878. Off and on the community grew and
declined. Because there was a town
called Placerville in Colorado the post office was changed to Russell. The only remaining tenants of the once thriving
settlement, Mr. and Mrs. Bill Griffith, came to Russell in 1922 as bride and
groom and aside from living at the Trinchera ranch and Pueblo have spent most
of the fifty years at Russell. They ran
a grocery store and a short order restaurant at the time the coal trucks were
crossing the pass. The Griffiths tell the story of Bud Vaughn and Fred La Marr
who were prospectors and assayers. They
had a cabin and prospect. Bud died and
they had to get a coroner before he could be moved or buried. A few days later LeMarr was found dead. He had taken cyanide which assayers use for
assaying. The settlers speculated that
he had tried out the cyanide on Bud first, then took it himself.
Some of the colorful residents of Placer were the
Berry brothers who had a prospect near the settlement. Fred was quite a lover of alcoholic
beverages – so much so that he finally died of alcoholism in the Alamosa
hospital. His drinking cronies came from
San Luis to attend the funeral. Fred’s
brother, Dick, was Roman Catholic but because Fred wasn’t the priest would not
come to hold services. A protestant
minister was not available so the services consisted of all the cronies just
bidding him goodbye. One of the friends
who was slightly inebriated, put his hat over his stomach, looked at the
corpse, and said, “Poor Fred! He’s
dead! Jesus himself would say he’s
dead!” When they were lowering the
casket into the grave, one of the pallbearers dropped the tape that was used to
lower the casket and the casket fell to the bottom of the grave with a thud.
The Berry grave and another grave, that of Jack
Thomas, are on the hillside outside of the cemetery (evidence can be seen of a
grave about 100 yds from the cemetery) because it was winter and they were
unable to make it to the cemetery.
The Stough baby drowned and was buried in this
cemetery – another infant died from diarrhea.
Some of the gravestones that remain in the cemetery
are Norman and Herman Hampton, 16 months old and one month old sons of A. K.
and M. C. Hampton.
There were three other children who died in 1880.
One soldier’s grave had two stones on it, a
soldier’s stone and another stone.
Each of the marked graves in this cemetery had a
footstone with the initials marked in it.
The cemetery was fenced by the Trinchera Ranch when
Mrs. Sims was the owner, with a five foot fence, which is not symmetrical as
all four sides are different lengths.
GARLAND CITY
William J. Palmer of Denver and Rio Grande fame
built a line to Pueblo and in 1877 extended it to Garland City, about six miles
east of Fort Garland. A settlement
immediately sprang up at the end of the railroad so they might be sheltered
during the winter. The next spring the railroad was built to Alamosa, reaching
there on July 4, 1878.
When the railroad was built into Alamosa on July 4,
the train carried not only passengers, but “Perched upon flatcars were two
hotels and a salon which had served their purpose admirably in Garland City,
but whose owner saw greater things in the new terminal town.” These business establishments were open for
business in the morning in Garland City and opened their doors again for
business that evening in Alamosa. One
of the settlers of Fort Garland remembers his mother telling of a smallpox
epidemic that winter in Garland City.
On a protruding hill above the settlement is a
small cemetery. There are six graves, most of them fenced and marked. At the upper part of the hill it appears as
if one of the bodies has been removed, as there is an indentation in the
earth. The headstones are wooden and
weather worn. Only a few letters and
numbers are readable now. The words
“Sacred to the Memory” and the date 1877 are still readable on one of the
headstones. Another one has the words
“In memory of” and the date 1877 is barely legible.
On the lower part of the hill are 3 graves that are
easily detected. One is marked “Manuel,
son of P. and G. Lamey – Born 1880 and died 1880. The exact dates are not readable because the stones have been
broken and part of them are lost. The
words “Room in Heaven” can be seen well.
There are other indications that could be graves, making about 13 or 14
possible gravesites. There is one grave
that has only the sunken hole where the body has been removed. One pioneer remembers the man who was buried
at that place. He was a 22-year-old
young man who was killed by mistake. A
holdup man mistook him for a man of similar appearance who was carrying a
payroll and shot him. The victim’s
friends carefully placed a headboard with painstakingly carved name and details
of his death on it at his grave and placed a picket fence around it. Several years later the pioneer returned and
found the boy’s relatives from Delaware had taken the body, headboard and
picket fence back to Delaware leaving only the cavity where the body had been.
The Robinson girls, Gladys and Ethel, remember that
five of the Etter children died and were buried at Garland City. The father, Fred Etter, was a soldier who
had been discharged from the fort at Fort Garland. He married a Navajo Indian girl who was a servant for a Mr.
Gallegos. When they were married, Mr.
Gallegos gave the newlyweds some cattle and some rangeland near Garland City
and this is the reason they were located there. One of the reasons the Robinson girls remember so well that the
five children died, was because every year Mrs. Etter would go to the cemetery
and hold Indian ceremonials over the children’s graves.
SIERRA
When the railroad was built over Veta Pass, there
were two settlements, one at the top of Veta Pass and one about 8 miles down
the west side of the pass called Sierra.
Veta Pass, the railroad pass, is not to be confused with La Veta Pass
which is the present highway. At the
top of Veta Pass, they had a box factory where they made wooden crates from the
plenteous lumber in that area to be shipped to Rocky Ford and Las Animas where
they packed fruit, and a section house for the railroad. At one time they had a boardinghouse, a
commissary, and a school at Veta Pass.
In 1915, they had the school in session during the summer, and in the
fall, loaded all the school equipment onto the train and moved it down to
Russell Junction for school that winter.
About this time the box factory closed and the school remained at
Russell Junction. None of the old-timers
living at Veta Pass who were interviewed remember any cemetery on top of the
pass. However, the other settlement,
Sierra, which had a lumber mill and section house, did have a cemetery. Freida Meder recalls that William Etter, the
son of Fred Etter and is Navajo wife, who were discussed in the section on
Garland City, died and was buried at Sierra.
She also remembers two Langdon children and 3 to 6 other workers’
children being buried there
The author tried to find the cemetery at Sierra and
could not locate it even though Mrs. Meder gave her instructions. Whether it has grown over with sagebrush
until it is not recognizable or whether the author missed the exact spot is
difficult to tell.
All that is left of these two settlements are a few
remnants of buildings, an old washtub and a few rusted cans.
ARROWHEAD INDIAN BURIALS
On the Arrowhead Ranch at the foot of majestic
Mount Blanca, as the Hansens were plowing a field up the arroya southeast of
the houses, they plowed up the remnants of an Indian grave. The Indian was seated facing the west and an
abalone shell was tied over his face with leather thongs. The skull was sent to the University of
Illinois for study but no one has any knowledge of what was learned at the
University. Mrs. Edith Hansen believes
that there were other graves below the houses and to the west.
Mrs. Hansen and Mrs. L. C. Jones both tell of the
Jircarilla Apache Indians coming to the ranch from Dulce to hold
ceremonials. Mrs. Hansen remembers the
rented horses from the Hansens and took a very old Indian to the summit of
Mount Blanca. She remembers the would
not let anyone go with them and they thought it was a ceremonial to turn the
leadership from the elderly man to a younger one who seemed to be in charge of
the group. The Indians intimated that
Mount Blanca was their old stomping grounds.
Dr. and Mrs. Jones remember in the evenings they would wear white
buckskin suits and stand in a circle with their arms crossed. Sometimes they would sit for hours on the
haunches with a rock under their heels.
A letter to the author from Charlie Vigil, chief of
the Jicarilla Apache Tribe at Dulce, NM, indicated they have no records or
recollections of these trips into Arrowhead – or perhaps the purposely aren’t
remembering.
On the road going across the foothills from the
White Mountain Ranch to the Arrowhead Ranch, one pioneer recalls finding a
skeleton which some badgers had uncovered.
The author and the pioneer investigated and found poles which looked
like the corners of a building and an old stove door with the patent date 1858
on it and some square nails which indicated it was very old. Across the road where the old timer saw the
skeleton, were what could have been the markings of two graves. The exposed skeleton that he saw was of
quite a large person. The pioneer, Al
Vigil, rode the foothills in this area many years ago, trapping, and recalls
that Indians camped here many times. In
fact, after a rain one time he saw a shiny thing in the edge of a gully that
had just been washed out. He thought it was a smooth white rock, but when he
recovered it, it was a skull which had high cheekbones so he believed it was an
Indian skull.
SHUMATE INDIAN BURIAL
A few years ago the irrigation district unearthed a
skeleton east of Sangre De Cristo Creek and east of the Shumate place. It was along a steep, rocky cliff and the
skeleton was in a sitting position. The
skeleton was badly mutilated. When
Billy Hoagland examined the skeleton, he found an arrowhead in the spine. He thinks the victim was wounded by an arrow
and crawled into a rocky crevice and died there. Merle Smith, who unearthed the skeleon, found a gun and sabre
with the remains. He still has the gun.
A conservation engineer says the bones were that of
a Ute Indian.
In the early days, there were many reasons why families buried their loved ones on their own land or in a separate place from the public or church cemeteries.
The weather sometimes prevented them from traveling
on roads that were not well kept through winter months. There was sometimes a difference of
religious beliefs which prevented burials in another church plot.
In the very early days, the threat of Indian attack
prevented the cemetery from being located very far from the settlement and
often prevented families from traveling any great distance to bury their dead.
In some cases, the families just preferred their
loved ones buried on family land – “at home” so to speak. One resident remembers a baby dying in the
family. A small coffin was made by a
member of the family and the baby was buried below the bedroom window.
Another resident recalls that her uncle made
coffins. If the family was a family of
means, he lined it with satin. If they
were less well to do, he lined it with flannel.
Whatever the reason, there were many family plots
and single burials throughout the county.
Although the writer cannot possibly mention all of them, she will tell
of some of them
THE ABEL VIGIL CEMETERY
The Abel Vigil ranch is located at the edge of San
Pablo. The family cemetery is located
at the edge of a field at the foot of some rolling hills.
It has been told that the Vigils were among the
first to break with the Catholic Church when the Presbyterian missionaries came
and that when they had the first death in the family, the Catholics did not
want them to bury in the Catholic cemetery and the Vigils did not wish their
loved one to be buried in the Catholic plot so they started a plot of their
own.
A fence was built around the plot to protect
it. There are six graves in the
plot. Abel Vigil’s grandfather and
grandmother, his older brother and sister who died in 1918 during the flu
epidemic and two small babies – a brother and a cousin. Brush now grows in the small cemetery –
perhaps because those who remember the ones buried here are gone or physically
unable to care for it. A Presbyterian
plot was later started at San Pablo so the rest of the Vigils were buried
there.
TRINIDAD BERNAL CEMETERY
Up the Culebra Valley from Chama, on a hill overlooking
the Culebra River, is a fenced cemetery containing the graves of Trinidad
Bernal, born 1868 and died 1945, and his wife, Santita, 1879 to 1939. There is also a small unmarked grave which
could have been a baby’s grave. One
pioneer said that he was a Presbyterian one year, “Jesus Only” the next year
and something else the next, so wanted to be buried by himself.
VICENTE GONZALES
Located on the ranch where Vicente Gonzales lived,
about fifty yards from the house under a large tree is a cemetery with part of
a wooden fence remaining. A lilac bush
has been planted in one corner. One
resident recalls that there were five or six children buried there though the
graves are indistinguishable now. Mr.
Gonzales, who was a teacher at San Pablo for many years and, being a
Presbyterian, could not bury his loved ones in the Catholic Cemetery.
THE ED BRENNAMAN CEMETERY
About a mile south of Fort Garland, situated as
close to the highway as it could be, is the Ed Brennaman family plot.
Ed Brennaman was a farmer who came to the valley
sometime before 1894. In 1894, he
married and, after living on several farms, settled on the farm about a mile
south of Fort Garland.
They farmed and threshed for other farmers – some
as far away as La Jara – for a living.
They had eight children. In April 1918, one son, Seward Brennaman, died of pneumonia and
his mother could not bear his being buried in the rocks on the hill which, at
that time, was the only cemetery around Fort Garland, so they started a family
plot in the trees a short way from the house.
The following July, a son-in-law, Harvey Grace,
died and he, too, was buried in the family plot.
Shortly after this, Ed’s mother and father passed
away and were buried there. The last
grave to placed in the family plot in the shade of the trees was daughter of
the Graces, Lucille.
In 1957, the highway from Fort Garland to San Luis
was being widened. In order to insure
that no one would disturb the five graves, the highway department built a fence
around it, but also removed all the trees so that the shady plot in the grove
of trees, is now a fenced plot with a lilac hedge sheltering it and iris
planted to show that a family still cares.
The Brennamans are buried in other cemeteries. Some are in the Fort Garland Cemetery.
HOFFMAN BURIALS
Below the Mountain Home Dam at the mouth of the
Trinchera Canyon, there is an 8’ x 7’ plot fenced with poles which designates
the burial place of Joseph Hoffman, age 84, and his wife, Mary, who died at 67
and their son Rudolph, who was 20 years old when he died.
Rudolph was originally buried south of Blanca on a ranch and was later moved by
Mr. Hoffman to his ranch.
There is a story about Rudolph Hoffman and Harry
Thompson who were frisky young boys who many times had been observed trying to
shoot the heels off their boots.
Somehow Rudolph was shot and killed and Harry Thompson was sent to the
penitentiary for it. (There is some
feeling that this was unjust.)
JULIA BRENNAMAN CEMETERY
Situated at the top of the hill overlooking Fort
Garland is a fenced cemetery with six graves – five of them marked.
The first burial in the plot was that of Edman
Marshall Crews, who was the son of Julia Brennaman and her first husband. The next burial was that of Julia’s sister,
Eva Beall, who was buried in 1919. The
unmarked grave is that of Eva’s son, Levi Beall. The next burial was in 1929, May 29, when Ted Brennaman was
buried. He was the son of Julia
Brennaman, who is the last person buried in this plot. A cousin relates this story of the death of
Ted.
On the morning of May 22, Ted’s wife Eva and her
sister Ruth Judd (who was holding a baby) were seated in the house and Ted came
in with a gun and told them that he was going to kill them. He shot Ruth first and Eva ran out, he shot
her. He then ran to his father’s house
where he threw the gun (which had jammed) down. He then ran to his uncle’s house (Charles Robinson). Mrs. Robinson saw blood on his face and said
“Ted, you’ve been hurt. Let me fix you
up.” He said, “No, they’re after me”
and ran out. As he ran toward his
mother’s house, a man by the name of Vasquez dropped to his knee, took a shot
and killed him. The funeral for Ted was
held in his mother’s house.
The cousin who related this story indicates that
Ted’s father had said earlier that Ted had been acting strangely and it was
confirmed that on this day, he had not been drinking. This is the first time the cousin had heard of marijuana and
Ted’s father suspected that Ted and the fried he ran with were “on marijuana”
because they always seemed “in a daze.”
One of the pioneers who was part owner of a
mortuary at this time, recalled going with the hearse to pick up the bodies in
Fort Garland and found them piled in the middle of the street when he go there.
TOBIN RANCH AND DOW BURIALS
Some old-timers remember a small graveyard at the
Old Tobin Ranch southwest of Fort Garland that was fenced by a pole fence. One pioneer believed that they were the
graves of some of the children of the ranch hands on Tobin’s ranch. There is nothing left now of these
burials. An irrigation canal goes right
through the area.
Another small graveyard in that area was a small
one containing five graves behind the Old Dow place. One pioneer recalled that there are five children in one family
who died of scarlet fever during the epidemic.
The funerals were a very private affair since the family did not wish to
expose other people to the dread disease.