History Of Cheesman Park

Understanding Cheesman Park: What Actually Happened Here

Cheesman Park in Denver wasn't always a park. The land sat empty for decades before anything meaningful was built on it. In the early 1800s, this area outside Denver's original town limits was just foothill terrain—dry, dusty, and frankly not worth much to anyone. The park's name comes from Michael Cheesman, a banker and one of Denver's earliest settlers who owned a substantial tract of land here in the late 1800s. He died in 1893, and his widow, Helen, decided to donate portions of the estate to the city with the specific intention of creating a public park. That donation happened in 1897, and the land officially became Cheesman Park. What makes this place worth tracking isn't just the donation itself. It's what happened to the ground before the park existed. Underneath the current landscaping sits a former cemetery. The Cheesman Cemetery operated from 1864 to 1890, and roughly 2,300 people were buried there before the city relocated most of the remains to other cemeteries when the park development began. A small number of graves still remain on-site, marked and maintained.

The actual park design came later. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was consulted on the master plan in 1905, though his involvement was advisory rather than hands-on. The park's layout—the winding paths, the placement of trees, the central lawn—still follows that general approach, which is why it looks and feels different from a standard grid-park design you see elsewhere in the city. I spent a few years ago digging into the relocation records because someone on a local history forum had made a claim about unmarked graves that turned out to be wrong. The issue is that the original cemetery records are fragmented. Some burial logs were lost in the 1900s when the Denver Public Library underwent reorganization, and others ended up at the History Colorado archives without proper cross-referencing. I tracked down a box of handwritten ledger sheets that listed names, dates, and plot locations for about 800 of the relocated interments. Without those ledgers, any account of the cemetery's history is incomplete. Here's something most people miss about Cheesman Park. The park has been repeatedly expanded and modified over the decades, and each round of changes created new complications. The 1930s WPA work on the park's infrastructure—including the construction of the park's famous stone amphitheater—was done quickly and with limited oversight. I've seen plans from that era where the engineers just filled in old cemetery plots with whatever fill dirt was available. That's why certain areas of the park have drainage problems even now, over a hundred years later. The ground settling is real, and it traces back to those rushed 1930s fills.

Another thing that doesn't get enough attention is the tension between the park as a recreational space and the park as a memorial site. Denver Parks and Recreation runs events there constantly—concerts, farmer's markets, dog festivals—and they don't always coordinate closely with the historical preservation side. I worked with a group that wanted to install a small marker near the reinterment site, and the permit process took nearly eight months because multiple departments had to sign off. The parks department wanted one thing, the historic preservation office wanted another, and the cemetery records themselves were unclear about exact boundaries. If you're looking to visit or research this place, the best starting point is the Denver City Clerk's archives for the original donation deed and the cemetery relocation reports. Those are public records but they aren't indexed well online. You'll need to go in person or request copies through the municipal FOIA process. There's also a collection at the Denver Public Library's Western History Collection, but again, it's not searchable by name in any straightforward way. I've found that calling the library's reference desk and asking specifically for the "Cheesman Cemetery relocation ledgers, 1890-1895" gets you further than any email request. The park itself is still actively used, and it's one of the more densely visited green spaces in Denver. The lake in the center is a maintenance headache—it was originally designed as a decorative feature but now requires constant dredging because sediment from the surrounding hillside fills it in faster than anyone anticipated. The city spends roughly $200,000 annually on lake maintenance, which is more than most people expect for a park feature this size.

There's no single authoritative book on the History Of Cheesman Park. What exists is scattered across municipal documents, newspaper archives from the 1890s to the 1940s, and a few papers from local historical societies. The most useful single source I've found is a 1978 study commissioned by the city's Landmarks Preservation Board, but even that has gaps. If you're doing serious research on this, you'll end up cross-referencing at least five different document types before you feel confident in any conclusion. One edge case worth noting: if you're trying to locate a specific grave that was relocated from Cheesman Cemetery, don't assume the current grave markers on-site correspond to the original burial locations. The reinterments were moved to Green Mountain Cemetery and other sites outside Denver. The markers you see in Cheesman Park today are markers, not actual graves. I've seen several families visit the park looking for what they believed were their ancestors' remains, and it's genuinely heartbreaking because the information they were given was inaccurate. The cemetery relocation was handled with varying degrees of care, and some remains were moved in bulk without individual documentation. The park also has a problematic relationship with its own reputation. It's frequently cited in articles about Denver's best parks, and most of those articles repeat the same simplified origin story—banker donated land, park was made, done. They don't mention the cemetery, the relocation, the drainage issues, or the ongoing tension between recreation and preservation. If you want the full picture, you have to go past the visitor brochures and dig into the actual records, which as I said, aren't easy to access.