At the Dillon Cemetery, one grave simply reads “might have been Mrs. Harper's brother.”

Linda Polhemus, a fourth-generation Summit County resident and member of the Cemetery Advisory Committee, surmises that. at some point, residents put their heads together, came up with that conclusion and marked the site as best they could.

The grave is among 130 unmarked or unreadable markers in the cemetery the committee has been working to mark since about 2005. Since the start of the project, 53 of the 130 sites have received headstones, etched with the person's name and the date they died. Altogether, the cemetery has 674 graves.

The advisory committee was created in 2003 to help the Dillon Town Council preserve the dignity and history of the site and the buried individuals. It was only after its formation that members noticed the high number of unmarked and unreadable graves, and set about to fix the problem. Over the last few years, they've raised enough funds to mark the 53 graves at about $250 a headstone, with a large portion of it coming from the Summit County Rotary Club and matched by the Town of Dillon. Some families have purchased new headstones for family plots. A first-time organized tour of the cemetery earlier this month helped generate about $1,000 in donations, the day of and since the event — enough to mark four more graves.

“Monuments are meant to be a place where you can visit your past,” Polhemus said. “They are a kind of a community scrapbook and they are important in a way they keep history alive. They are a link to our past and give us a clearer picture of the present and the future.”

History

The cemetery was created in 1885 in the old part of Dillon, but moved to its current location in 1962 to accommodate the new Dillon Reservoir. Records from the move have actually made the project easier, Polhemus said, since both the Denver Water Board and the town had to do a lot of research before making the transition. Polhemus said any new headstones for individuals moved from the old cemetery are being marked with a “D” inside of a circle.

Although many of the markers are somewhat readable, there's still some that require a little research. Polhemus said some inconsistencies in dates have emerged in the town's records as they've been transferred from person to person over the years. One young woman's grave was found to have been marked with an incorrect death date. The discrepancy was noticed by Polhemus' mother, who was a pallbearer at the woman's funeral when she was about 10 years old. The year of death listed would have meant Polhemus' mother was too young to participate.

“Later on I found it in the death records and it was like five years off,” Polhemus said.

Other gravesites house unknown miners, with plain explanations like “killed in the Boss Mine,” or “killed in the Penn. Mine.”

“Those we have chosen to leave unmarked just in case there's some way to research who they were at some point,” Polhemus said.