Fairmount is Colorado's most populous cemetery and a peaceful place to study history and architecture. Fairmount's founders promised to abandon the “mournful effects of the old style cemetery” for the rural cemetery park initiated at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fairmount recruited Reinhard Schuetze, a native of Holstein, Germany, who had studied landscape architecture and engineering at the Royal Academy in Potsdam. Bringing to Denver the concept of romantic landscape, he planted more than 4,000 trees in Fairmount, which is still the state's largest and most diverse arboretum. Schuetze, Colorado's first landscape architect, subsequently designed or redesigned many Denver parks.
Many well-known Coloradans dwell in this necropolis, where a number erected obelisks and Greek temple mausoleums as their final earthly homes. Frank E. Edbrooke probably designed his own relatively modest Neoclassical mausoleum, as did architect-developer Temple Hoyne Buell, whose final mansion is a polished granite crypt with elaborate wrought iron doors. Buell, a multi-millionaire by the time of his death, topped his mausoleum with two Egyptianesque female figures in gilded cast iron, Princess and Pauper.
Henry T. E. Wendell was the designer of the Richardsonian Romanesque gate lodge ( DV218.1; 1890), on East Alameda Avenue, and the Ivy Chapel ( DV218.2; 1890), a fine, frilly, French Gothic apparition. The communal Mausoleum ( DV218.3; 1930, Mount-joy and Frewen) is a huge Greek temple with a granite veneer. Inside, fine stained glass windows, Alabama white marble walls, Tennessee pink marble floors, and soft recorded music create a celestial atmosphere.