Golden Cemetery
Jefferson County
The Golden Cemetery is significant for its association with exploration and settlement of Golden providing an essential need for the new community. It is the final resting place of several significant persons in the history of Golden and central Colorado including Edward L. Berthoud, George West, and George Morrison. The cemetery is important for its association with the development of funerary art and planned and landscaped community cemeteries in Colorado between the 1870s and mid-1900s. Although not the first planned, community-established burial ground in the region, Golden Cemetery was created in 1873 as one of the state’s earliest memorial parks, or garden cemeteries.
Golden Cemetery
Golden Cemetery is also architecturally significant for its early 1930s WPA Rustic style Shelter House. The Shelter House was erected in 1933-34 by the Civil Works Administration (CWA), in conjunction with the City of Golden, to replace an inadequate wood frame building constructed in 1888. Construction of the new Shelter House was part of a concerted Depression-era effort to beautify the cemetery, which remained in use but suffered from a lack of adequate water for irrigation and had been sliding into disrepair. The building was erected with granite rubble walls laid in random coursing, a side-gabled roof with exposed rafter ends and a square granite chimney.