Kit Carson Cemetery

After seeing where Mabel Dodge Luhan [1] lived, you can also visit her grave, in Taos’s oldest cemetery.

A sprawl of headstones in a shady corner of Kit Carson Park, on Paseo del Pueblo Norte north of the Taos Inn, it was established in 1847 to bury the dead from the Taos Rebellion (the melée in which Governor Charles Bent was murdered).

First known simply as El Cementerio Militar, it earned its current name when the bodies of Mr. Carson and his wife were moved here in 1869 according to his will.

Many of Taos’s oldest families, particularly the merchants of the late 1800s, are buried here. Mabel had been a very close friend of the trader Ralph Meyers, and they often joked about being buried together. When Mabel died in 1962, a few years after Ralph, writer Frank Waters (who had based a character in The Man Who Killed the Deer on Meyers) recalled their wishes and suggested that Meyers’s grave be scooted over to make room for Mabel; she was the last person to be buried in the cemetery, in 1962, and her grave is squeezed into the far southwest corner.

Other local luminaries at rest here include Padre Antonio Martinez, who stood up to Catholic bishop Lamy, and Englishman Arthur Manby, whose grave actually stands outside of the cemetery proper because of his lifetime of shady business deals, land grabs, and outright swindles perpetrated in town.

Manby was found beheaded in his mansion in 1929, and the unsympathetic populace was happy to call it natural causes.