After its last burials it fell unmaintained and overgrown, even as skiing and other resort industries revived Aspen's economy in the late 20th century.

[1] Within the cemetery grounds the land is gently rolling, cresting in the west central area and at the southern corners, where the slopes of Aspen Mountain rise across the street.

At the main entrance, midway along the south bound, is a sandstone tablet with the names of the Civil War veterans buried within.

In contrast, the 50 graves to the east are primarily Civil War veterans, buried in two long rows with government-issued markers, the only aspect of the cemetery indicating any planning.

[1] In the late 1870s, shortly after Colorado became a state, prospectors began crossing the Continental Divide at Independence Pass in search of silver deposits in the Roaring Fork Valley.

Many set up their tents about ten miles (16 km) below the pass at the confluence of the Roaring Fork and its tributary Castle Creek, the first area they found suitable for large-scale settlement.

None of the few inhabitants of the growing community had yet died, so the site of the current cemetery was chosen for the burial, land then owned by Charles Hallam, owner of the Smuggler Mine.

Undertakers set up shop in the city, taking some of their dead into Ute on a road, no longer extant, that entered the northern edge of the cemetery.

By 1888 two competing railroad lines had reached Aspen, giving mourners access to the kind of cut stone that could make fancier grave markers.

It was perhaps harder to reach but offered a more planned, rural cemetery atmosphere with planted aspens in rows and a carriage access road with turnaround and became the burial ground preferred by middle-class and wealthy citizens.

The local Grand Army of the Republic veterans' organization began cleaning up the area where those graves currently are with the intention, never realized, of arranging them around a monument.

[1] In its first decade, Aspen had grown from a primitive collection of tents and log cabins to city of more than 10,000, with a luxury hotel and opera house.

[1] Residents did not stop dying, and in 1900 Aspen Grove got competition from the elaborate Red Butte Cemetery, on the western edge of the city.

[1] City records show that 13 people were buried in Ute during the 1920s, many of them older residents who were indigent at the time of their deaths and could not afford markers.