Cemeteries, aside from their obvious purpose, offer solitude and serenity, and the inhabitants don’t complain about loiterers. Sometimes there is decent shade to be had, and the fleeting company of birds. There are flowers, real and artificial, to provide color, and likely balloons or flags to add motion to the scene. While we have nothing to compete with the Glasgow Necropolis for size or ornateness, our Prescott graveyards don’t lack for history. One can wander for hours, noting dates, names and gravestone iconography. There’s nothing morbid or creepy involved. It’s contemplative. So many lives, so many stories we will never know.
Charles Boblett was laid to rest in a plot of land in the Granite Dells in 1895. He was less that two years old, and his is the only stone in the Boblett Cemetery, a quiet, pretty spot just off the Peavine Trail.
In 1912 the body of a local eccentric miner was found, along with the gun he’d used to kill himself, on a hill overlooking the Hassayampa River. In his suicide note he expressed hope that the spirits would take advantage of the hole in his head to depart, perhaps for South America. His name was Malcolm Matheson and he now lies in Citizen’s Cemetery, which features a number of wonderful handmade memorials of the less affluent.
That same year 16-year-old Sarah Marshall was enjoying the Labor Day festivities on the courthouse lawn with other young ladies when she suddenly dropped inexplicably dead at the foot of the Buckey O’Neill monument. She was buried in Mountain View Cemetery. This cemetery was started in 1865, so there are many old stones to view. Some areas seem overcrowded, and gnarled trees add to the cramped quarters. When a bit overgrown, the place takes on a shady, gothic aspect.
Mary Cummings was interred at the Pioneer Home Cemetery in 1940 and people still frequently visit her grave. At one point in her life she was better known as Big Nose Kate, and she outlived her famous boyfriend Doc Holliday by 54 years. Fittingly, this cemetery is also the final resting place of poet, journalist and historian Sharlot Hall. It boasts a juniper shade tree that has recently been fenced off, presumably to discourage idlers and the heat-stricken bereaved from seeking relief beneath it.
A zinc monument in the Oddfellows Cemetery marks the burial of Charles Humphreys, who traveled over 5,000 miles from North Wales to die at the Senator mining camp south of Prescott in 1909. The Fraternal Order should be advised that the western edge of the cemetery is rapidly eroding, and that some markers buried in brush are on the verge of washing into a gully. What happens when the caskets come unearthed one shudders to think.
Rolling Hills Cemetery began in 1933, whether from kindness, convenience or veniality, who can say, to service the indigent. Plots cost between five and ten dollars and the location was far north of town. While thousands drive past this cemetery every day, comparatively few know it exists. If you’ve ever driven down Ruger Road, you’ve passed through this graveyard, because the road bisects it.
What’s interesting about this cemetery is that it’s segregated by race. Maybe some of the others were too at some point, but at Rolling Hills it’s more obvious and more incongruous. These people were all poor, all deemed unfit to lie for eternity in Prescott proper, and yet white, black, Hispanic and Asian could not be expected to coexist even in death. Some of the deceased might well have approved of the policy of segregation, but if there hadn’t been one, surely they’d be over it by now. Once you’re dead, it’s time to put away petty bigotry.
There are other burial places scattered around the area that we can visit. There’s one off Williamson Valley Road, on the Juniper Springs Trail. There’s another at the site of what used to be the hamlet of McCabe, near Humboldt. There are several in deep woods, on mountains and near long-abandoned mining camps that you can discover with research and diligence. Some of these places are nearly gone, and if you didn’t know they were there, you might not see them at all.
Take a walk through a local cemetery. So many lives, long and short, carefree and tragic. So many stories of innocence and hope, of madness and adventure. Lives and stories at which the stones only hint, and which we will never know. Something to contemplate.
