City Sextons: Tales From Municipal Leaders by Staci M Zavattaro

Author:Staci M Zavattaro [Zavattaro, Staci M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367250836
Google: xtJNzQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 51150301
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-03-15T07:21:26+00:00

5 Dark Tourism and the Cemetery

I deal with everything that a city does. It’s just the people are quieter. (Christopher Cooke, superintendent of cemeteries, City of Evansville, Illinois)

Deadwood, South Dakota is a tourist town. Nestled in the state’s Black Hills region, Deadwood is known for ushering in a gold rush in 1874 (Deadwood Chamber of Commerce, 2019). Figures such as Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok called the town home and are now buried in Mount Moriah Cemetery. Bob Nelson, the city’s public works director who also oversees cemetery operations, told me Mount Moriah pre-dates the city’s incorporation, with some of the first burials in Deadwood traced to 1878 (City of Deadwood, 2019). The city was incorporated and platted in 1881, he explained.

Deadwood’s primary source of revenue is tourism, gaming, resorts, and spas. Bob explained the entire town is a national historic landmark district since 1966, and some money earned from the booming gaming industry goes into historic preservation. “So there’s a licensing fee per device or table that is placed in Deadwood,” he said, and some of that money has helped a multi-million dollar renovation of historic Mount Moriah cemetery.

The cemetery has a storied history, becoming the city’s first official burial space in 1878 after county commissioners realized the Whitewood Gulch area was too flat to properly secure bodies (Center for Historic Cemeteries Preservation, n.d.). Mount Moriah became the final burial place for both the city’s elite and poor, with distinctive grave markers showing socio-economic standing even after death. Bob said when Mount Moriah came to be, some bodies needed to be relocated from Whitewood Gulch.

Part of the cemetery in the very beginning was located in that neighborhood (a presidential district where all the streets are named after presidents) and then it was relocated up higher on the hill. Evidently not everyone got moved when that happened. We’ve had a few retaining wall projects. In fact, this was before my time, but there was a home built in the presidential district, and they found some bodies when they were putting the basement in. So, there’s a very lengthy process whenever you find a body. We have a dedicated portion of the cemetery, which is on city property that’s separate from Mount Moriah but it’s really close, so we reinterred those people there. And we actually had a ceremony for everyone one of those.

One of those found people has an interesting story. Known as the Deadwood Pioneer today, the remains, specifically the skull, were sent to forensic anthropologist Dr. Diane France in Colorado (Taylor, 2017). Karen Taylor, a forensic portrait artist, also worked on the remains, using a detailed digital rendering technique to approximate what this person might have looked like in life. Scientists, artists, and historians worked together to determine the remains were of a white male, likely wealthier thanks to gold fillings in his teeth. The Deadwood Pioneer took about five years to identify and is now a local legend within the city (Pearson, 2017). (The article from

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