Hillside Cemetery of Silverton Colorado
by Priscilla Burgers
Title
Hillside Cemetery of Silverton Colorado
Artist
Priscilla Burgers
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
HILLSIDE CEMETERY OF SILVERTON COLORADO by PRISCILLA BURGERS
There are about eight times more people buried in Hillside Cemetery than there are live folks in the town below. Many of the 3,300 dearly departed have been at Hillside for a century or more. This cemetery has served Silverton for 133 years. During the boomtown mining days, avalanches, mine accidents, pneumonia, done-in livers, childbirth, miner’s lung and lead poisoning (gunshot) made burials a brisk business. Until 1910, there were busy undertakers and cemetery workers but modern Silverton has no official caretaker, grave digger, mortician or funeral home. There are also no official plots. Silverton Town Administrator Elyse Salazar refers to Hillside as “somewhat of a free-for-all.” There are 2,000 unmarked graves from early days, but even the more modern deceased hold no deeds as in most cemeteries. For a $250 fee, they simply get the rights to a very long rental on a spot they can only hope won’t yield another casket when the digging begins. “If there’s someone down there, I tell them ‘You have to move over,’ ” said Freda Peterson Gooch, a tiny, spry 80-year-old history buff who is the closest thing this town has to a mortician.
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Uploaded
September 27th, 2018
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