September 29, 2010

Cemetery Tour: Revisiting history

By John Gleason

More than 150 people walked through 118-year-old Mount Olivet Cemetery the afternoon of Sept. 25 to learn more about historic Catholic figures in Denver.

The 400-acre cemetery located in Wheat Ridge had opened its gates for a two-hour interactive tour. The day was perfect for walking, sunny but not too hot. Before the group began the tour, they gathered in the main chapel to hear Mike Wright, director of the cemetery and the archdiocesan mortuary, give an overview of the cemetery and its ministry.  

 “This is a place of peace and tranquility,” he told those in attendance, “although it can seem hectic on those days when we have 16 burials scheduled."

“We bury 1,400 people a year,” he added. “The archdiocesan mortuary handles more than 650 families, most of whom want their loved ones buried at Mount Olivet.  In addition, we bury 95 percent of the poor that come to us from the state and the county.” 

Wright said a person doesn’t have to be Catholic to be buried at the cemetery.

“Our ministry is to take care of their human remains—God takes care of the rest,” he said. “The ministry is two-fold: we take care of those who have died and we take care of those who are grieving.”

Ron Beck of Arvada was among the tour participants. 

“I’ve taken tours of some of the other cemeteries in the area,” he told the Denver Catholic Register, “and I think it’s great that Mount Olivet has this look into the past of the Church in Colorado.”

Dedicated on Sept. 25, 1892, Mount Olivet is the final resting place for 150,000 people, including 7,000 who were reinterred from its predecessor, Calvary Cemetery, now site of the Denver Botanic Gardens.

“That old cemetery was condemned in 1909,” Wright said, “and the city would no longer let them accept new burials.  Many families had their relatives moved to Mount Olivet over the next 40 years. Then, in 1950, a massive undertaking removed the rest of the bodies and brought them to Mount Olivet.”

The tour made stops at the graves of the infamous Baby Doe Tabor, former slave Julia Greeley and Martin Currigan, patriarch of the Currigan family, which produced one mayor for the city of Denver. Other stops included the Howlett family on whose sandstone monument is recorded the oldest date in the cemetery(John Howlett, 1796-1865, whose remains were transplanted from Calvary Cemetery) and Elizabeth Kelly, who was a member of Annunciation Church and is the first recorded burial in Mount Olivet Cemetery (July 5, 1892).

Questions from the crowd ran the gamut from why are people generally buried facing east (so they’ll be ready for the resurrection) to how tall a monument can be (5 feet—anything higher must go to cemetery management for approval).

Mount Olivet is responsible for the upkeep of the grounds, but families must take care of individual headstones.  Families are notified should a monument become cracked or broken and are given the option of deciding what to do.

“We have one monument, an obelisk sitting on a stone that was struck by lightening,” Wright told the audience.  “The lower portion was knocked askew off the base and the top of the obelisk was knocked off. We offered to help the family restore it but they said it was an act of God and wanted it left as it was.”

As lunchtime approached, the tour came to the Gallagher Chapel where the bishops of Denver are buried.  On the grounds immediately in front of the chapel where priests and religious women are buried, one woman veered off from the tour and stood in front of a marker of a Sister of Charity.  The woman, who declined to give her name, said she attended the tour to find this particular grave.

“If it hadn’t had been for this nun,” she told the Register, “my life would have been very, very different.”

Wright said he hopes the tours will become an annual event that helps people reconnect with their past.

“I want people to have an appreciation for the ministry that goes on out here,” he said.