Gilpin County has many more residents below ground than above. Over a dozen cemeteries served this once frenetic collection of mining towns and camps. Dynamite was used to blast burial space out of the stony terrain, and mourners might spend more time examining the new hole in the ground for gold than in burying the deceased.
Six cemeteries are concentrated on this flats at the headwaters of Eureka Gulch, 2 miles west of Central City near Russell Park and the Boodle Mine: City, Catholic, Ancient Order of Foresters, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, and the Improved Order of Red Men. Their tomb-stones reflect life and death in a mining town. In 1879, for instance, records of the Catholic Cemetery list thirty-eight burials; eleven of the dead were under one year old and four were “killed in a mine.” About one death in ten came in a mine mishap, while