Tombstone’s “Boothill Cemetery”

by Clement Wood
(as printed in the February 13, 1947 Tombstone Epitaph)

Misstatements about Tombstone’s graveyards range from the one in Walter Noble Burn’s “Tombstone” (page 37):

“Boot Hill Cemetery...is the town’s only burying ground and is to remain so for many years...” to the current trickling rumor that modern Boot Hill is entirely synthetic. According to this whispered misinformation, the original Boot Hill was part of the present “New Cemetery” on the present road to Schieffelin Monument -- the original road to Benson; and was only moved to its present location in the 1930s, when the present US 80 was laid out, to make it more accessible to gullible tourists.

Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Macia and a number of other old timers have graciously supplied the accurate information which leads to the following conclusions:

1. The first cemetery in Tombstone in 1879 or 1880, occupied the block now surrounded by 1^st and Sumner Streets, and Safford and Bruce. Mrs. Macia was reared in the house, still existing, catacornered from the cemetery, at 1^st and Safford. The Masonic section of this cemetery had Masonic symbols on its wooden gravemarkers. Ultimately this entire cemetery was abandoned, and the block converted to home-sites. Excavations for cesspools and the like still at times encounter graves and skeletons here. When a tennis court was built within the block, a grave-marker stood in the center of the site selected,, and this was thrown on a trashpile. We have located two low mounds entering the block, which may be the two last gravemounds here.

2. The cemetery, as if behaving like a jumping cholla, was then extended, after a brief gap in territory, to include the present Boot Hill Cemetery, slightly further from the town. It had a larger area than at present; the Jewish Cemetery, walled with adobe, being downhill from the present cemetery, in the direction of Sheep’s Head in the Dragoons. The present Community House building has the lower part of its wall made of the adobe originally walling the Jewish Cemetery. This cemetery was in use two years after the founding of the town. The 1881 markers include:

May Doody; Minnie Dowe; Mrs. Pring -- suicide; Della Williams -- suicide; Eve Waters, aged three months; Indian Bill; John King -- suicide; Billy Clanton, Frank McLowry and Tom McLowry, shot.

This burying ground was called merely the “Old Cemetery,” at first. When some book, possibly Frederick Bechdolt’s “When the West Was Young,” announced that Tombstone had one of the only three original Boot Hill Cemeteries left (from the phrase “He died with his boots on,”) The name was shifted to Boot Hill Cemetery. From the start, it included not only such burials, but those of members of the leading families in town. In it were buried the popular madame, Dutch Annie, her funeral including a thousand buggies and carriages; the wife of the first mayor of Tombstone, Mrs. Clum; the great gambler, dick Clark; and inside an iron fence still standing, Mrs. Stumph, wife of the baker, sister-in-law of the butcher Bauer. When this young expectant mother died in a dentist’s chair, her husband erected the iron fence, so that her little daughters might always know where their mother was buried; and years later, with children of their own, they visited it.

3. A new Cemetery, still further from the swiftly growing town, was laid out near the County Hospital, on the old Benson Road -- the present road to Schieffelin Monument. To the left, as you enter is a great rectangle of more than 450 unmarked grave mounds -- the inmates of the County Hospital. The first funeral, of James Lamb, took place June 30, 1884. The body of George M. Goodfellow, aged two months, who died in July, 1883 was later removed to this New Cemetery. Like Boot Hill Cemetery, it still has more unmarked graves than marked ones.