As you cross the green oasis of Pioneer Park on the city’s west side, you walk over the bones of untold stories.

The 5-acre park, on the mesa near Mesa Road and Fillmore Street, was once Mesa Cemetery, one of the Pikes Peak region’s oldest cemeteries, and the final resting spot for some of our first Colorado City (now Old Colorado City) residents going back as early as the 1850s, before Colorado was a territory, to the early 1900s.

“It’s an example of an ad hoc private cemetery that has a purpose as a place of burial outside city limits,” says Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum’s Curator of History Leah Davis Witherow.

“Over time, as the city grows and descendants die, there’s nobody left to care for it. It passes out of public memory. It becomes a victim of disrepair and vandalism, and the mesa was used for grazing cattle. Over time, this space was trampled literally and metaphorically.”

After the cemetery was abandoned in the early 20th century, some of its burials were moved to Evergreen Cemetery, the city’s first official cemetery, and Fairview Cemetery, off 26th Street, but not all of the bodies made the move. At least 46 citizens still rest under the verdant fields and playground. A 1977 story in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph reported that tests showed the presence of perhaps more than 100 coffins under the park.

“In one area there are a number of unmarked graves. We believe those are either miners or some of the ladies from the saloons — the ladies of the evening,” said historian Mel McFarland, who writes a column for the Ute Pass Courier, Tri-Lakes Tribune and other community newspapers. He was one of a group of volunteers in the early ’70s who used metal detectors to locate what they assumed were handles and other parts of caskets in the upper part of the park. None of the burials were ever relocated.

“They couldn’t find everybody. A lot of graves up there didn’t have markers,” McFarland said. “And later on what markers were there had been moved. During that time, we talked to families who had relatives they know were buried there and they’re not in Evergreen or Fairview so they’re probably still there, but they have no idea where.”

Confirming that number is tricky.

“Different folks came up with different numbers in their research,” Witherow said. “Dorothy Smith (former Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum curator) determined a number using historical records and came up with 46. Others have made that number much larger, but there’s no documentation, no list of names.”

On a late summer weekday afternoon the park is peaceful, the unobstructed view of Pikes Peak and Garden of the Gods made even more captivating by a thunderstorm. The playground is vacant, while a parent waits in a car to pick up their child who attends nearby Holmes Middle School.

In the northeastern corner of the park stands a marble monument dedicated to those who remain underground, erected in 1949 by the Pikes Peak Historical Society and El Paso County Pioneers’ Association. The monument bears the names of more than 40 residents who might still reside beneath the park, including eight veterans of the Sand Creek Massacre and three young boys killed and scalped by Arapahoe Indians during a raid in 1868.

“We don’t know who is there,” McFarland said. “There’s only one grave they hoped to find and never found. It was a lady from the early days of Colorado City who was buried in a cast iron casket. They believe it’s under the marker that’s up there, but nobody’s verified her.”

Pioneer Park is one of about a half dozen or more pioneer cemeteries that dot the landscape — historic burial grounds established by early settlers that often go forgotten. Before Mesa Cemetery, residents were buried near what’s now the 31st Street entrance to Red Rock Canyon Open Space, according to a city government website about the history of Evergreen Cemetery. But due to the hard clay soil that made digging difficult and the exposure to attacks from native tribes, burials were relocated to a hill above what’s now Colorado City Creamery before landing at Mesa Cemetery.

While today we might consider the mesa location prime real estate, in the 1860s and ’70s its distance from the population was its allure.

“For health reasons you don’t want a cemetery adjacent to where people are living,” Witherow said. “On the mesa it would have been out in the country, far removed from where people lived or worked.”

That’s the reasoning behind the abandonment of a pioneer cemetery near the Rio Grande Railroad downtown and relocation of its burials. With the Springs being promoted as an area with health benefits, including as a healing space for those with tuberculosis, having a cemetery so close to town and so visible to those arriving via train was bad marketing. So Brig. Gen. William Palmer donated up to 40 acres of land on the outskirts of town, what eventually became Evergreen Cemetery.

In the 1890s, Colorado City began to change with the arrival of the Midland Railway and the gold ore reduction mills. A town founder decided they needed a better cemetery, which led to the creation of Fairview Cemetery and the crumbling of Mesa Cemetery.

“Over time, due to the distance from Colorado City and Colorado Springs, and because it was adjacent to lands used for grazing cattle, the cemetery pretty quickly became a spot where cattle grazed and gravestones were kicked over or broken,” Witherow said.

“Even by the 1930s, when The Gazette Telegraph investigated the cemetery, decades of neglect had taken place. They put out a call asking people to contact El Paso County Pioneers’ Association and document whether they had loved ones buried there.”

Around that time, the Works Progress Administration did a preservation project in Mesa Cemetery, removing the remaining headstones for unknown reasons, but never putting them back. In the ’40s, the Pioneers’ Association and Pikes Peak Historical Society worked to document who might be buried there and came up with 46 confirmed burials.

The cemetery became a topic of controversy, sparking many stories in The Gazette about what to do with the land. When the city proposed turning it into a park, it was met with vehement disagreement by the relatives of those thought to be buried in the area.

“This is a conversation our community has had over successive decades, about what is important and how we commemorate those in cemeteries that no longer exist,” Witherow said. “Today it’s a public park and memorial, a compromise reached in the 1970s.”