Pueblo cemetery honors unmarked mass grave

PUEBLO, Colo. (KRDO) -- On Friday, Roselawn Cemetery in Pueblo erected a monument at the foot of a recently discovered unmarked mass grave.

Historians found the unmarked mass burial site in one of the oldest portions of the Roselawn Cemetery in Pueblo. Roselawn Cemetery says the gravesite dates back to the early 20th century and contains hundreds of remains.

Roselawn Cemetery staff lined the mass grave with gravel so vehicles driving through the cemetery steer clear. At the foot of the mass grave, staff erected a small gravestone with an angel to honor the lives of those buried at the site. There is no record of the dead buried at the site.

"We use the words and they serve as a compass for us. The words spoken by Benjamin Franklin over two hundred years ago, 'One can tell the moral of a culture by the way they treat their dead,'" said Lucille Corsentino, Chairwoman at Roselawn Cemetery in Pueblo. "We feel it's important each soul is honored and remembered and these people's lives ended in a very tragic way. They deserve to be remembered and commemorated."

Students from the Colorado School of the Mines, with grant funds from the Colorado State Historical Fund, used ground-penetrating radar to find hundreds of corpses. The bodies were buried in a series of trenches.

Staff at Roselawn say many of the dead passed away from the 1918 Spanish Flu or during the 1921 Pueblo Flood.  The gravestone also commemorates both disasters, as well as the 1904 Eden train wreck.