Concordia Cemetery Holds a Cross-Section of El Paso

Concordia Cemetery sits near Yandell Drive and the I-10 frontage road. It feels more like a layered city than one burial ground. It covers 52 acres, holds about 60,000 graves, and has burials from 1856 to the present.

The sections tell different stories. There are Catholic, Jewish, Masonic, Black, Mormon, Chinese, and pauper areas among the cemetery's marked sections. Military, Jesuit, city, and county burial grounds add more layers. By 1890, different groups had bought and named sections of their own.

The story begins earlier. The area was known as Concordia in the 1840s, when it was the home of Chihuahua trader Hugh Stephenson. His wife, Juana Azcarate, was buried on this ground in 1856. El Pasoans were making the three-mile trip to Concordia in larger numbers by the 1880s, and the cemetery grew as the city did.

Names and stones make that city story small enough to read one family at a time. Civic leaders, pioneers, war veterans, and gunfighter John Wesley Hardin are buried here. The range of sections turns one cemetery into a map of El Paso over time.