Lewis and Clark County and Helena city staff recently unveiled a sign at an unmarked burial site north of Helena, acknowledging its addition last year to the National Register of Historic Places.
Heritage preservation officer Pam Attardo says this land formerly functioned as a cemetery for the Lewis and Clark County Hospital when it was a residential care facility for people with nowhere else to go.
“Some of them came out to Montana by themselves from the east, and they did not have a safety net, they did not have a family to care for them.”
She says records suggest that nearly 400 men, women and children were buried here between 1891 and 1916.
“There’s a lot of unknowns,” she said. “Some we have names for. We have ages. We have dates they were buried. Sometimes we have their date of birth. Sometimes it’s just ‘a baby.’”
Among those buried here were people who built, mined and cultivated fields in the years before Montana became a state in 1889. Attardo says she hopes signage will encourage respectful use of the land.
