Restored Santa Fe Trail pioneer headstone to return home
Feb. 20—Kate Kingsbury's headstone is returning home.
That is, the historic headstone commemorating the long-dead pioneer of the Santa Fe Trail has been cleaned up, power dusted and framed and is ready for reinstalling at the Odd Fellows Cemetery off Cerrillos Road.
"It's going to be returned to the Odd Fellows," Will McDonald, a member of the Odd Fellows fraternal order in Santa Fe, said in an interview. He said he hopes it is back in place at the cemetery within a week or so.
Not everyone wants it to be that way, but they likely have little choice in the matter.
Tom Hyland, the Eldorado-based artist who removed the headstone and had it cleaned up and framed, said he asked the New Mexico History Museum to consider acquiring the marble monument, which is one of the oldest known stones of its type in Santa Fe.
"It's a New Mexico story; it's a Santa Fe story," Hyland said.
Hyland said he thinks the museum will do a better job of caring for the monument than the members of Odd Fellows.
"This is her testament," he said of the stone.
But McDonald said the headstone is the property of the Odd Fellows and he expects it to be returned there.
Billy G. Garrett, executive director of the New Mexico History Museum, said in an interview the museum has no plans for an exhibition that would "warrant this as a loan. It's a interesting story, an important story, and we respect that."
He said if the museum decided to review the possibility of acquiring the headstone, it would have to ensure "the actual owner of the object is the one we are dealing with."
And any such acquisition would not come with any promise to display the headstone, he said.
Former New Mexico History Museum director and Santa Fe Trail historian Fran Levine, whose book Crossings about female Santa Fe Trail travelers, including Kingsbury, is set to be published later this year, said she is happy the marker has been cleaned up. While she isn't sure "whether the Odd Fellows have the wherewithal to care for it," she doesn't think a museum is the right place to put it.
"I would hate to see it moved from what is supposed to be consecrated grounds, and I don't know why a museum would take in a headstone," Levine said in an interview. "It's not like it was found abandoned someplace."
The headstone drew considerable attention in the past couple of years after a tree fell on it in late 2021 and archeological expert and investigator Alysia Abbott said it's unclear where Kingsbury's actual remains are.
That's because she was originally buried in the original Odd Fellows Cemetery in downtown Santa Fe, near where La Secoya de El Castillo and the Santa Fe Scottish Rite Temple are today.
The mystery of where her remains are deepened late last summer when the headstone disappeared from the Odd Fellows Cemetery.
Though some suspected theft at the time, it turns out the Odd Fellows' leaders gave permission to the End of the Trail chapter of the Santa Fe Trail Association to remove it, clean it up and return it.
Hyland said he cut away the tree that fell on the headstone before he removed it. He said the marker was in two pieces with the top — an image depicting weeping willows — separated from the main monument, which includes this inscription:
Mrs. Kate L. Kingsbury
Died June 5th, 1857 at the crossing of Arkansas River
Aged 30 Years
"Blessed are the Dead which die in the Lord"
Hyland painted a panel bearing those same words on the back of the headstone so anyone approaching it from either side can recognize it.
Kingsbury had died on her second trip west from the East Coast, where the Kingsburys were originally from, to New Mexico. Her life was one of loss and sadness. Not only did she suffer from painful coughing fits and exhaustion brought on by tuberculosis, but her one son died before he reached the age of 2.
Her husband, John, aware she was severely ill, made sure there was a coffin packed on the wagon train bringing her back from the East lest she die along the way. Following her death, John and some companions then transported the coffin with her body to Santa Fe.
But as that old downtown cemetery fell into disarray, a new graveyard, commissioned in 1884 as the Aztlan Cemetery, was created south of town, according to an El Palacio article written by Abbott. Sometime between 1890 and 1903, she wrote, Kingsbury's remains were exhumed and she was moved to the Aztlan, near the current Odd Fellows Hall on Cerrillos Road.
Abbott told The New Mexican in 2021 bodies and monuments didn't always move together in those days, and she could not say for certain where Kate's remains are. They could have been scattered, stolen or abandoned along the way.
McDonald said he plans to return the monument to its original resting place in one corner of the cemetery. While no one else of note is buried there — except for Sam Ketchum, brother of notorious New Mexico outlaw Thomas "Blackjack" Ketchum — McDonald said Kingsbury's headstone raises an important question:
"What is our obligation to the dead, particularly those people we know wonderful, interesting stories about, like Kate Kingsbury?
"Almost all of the people buried here we know nothing about and don't have any stories about," he continued. "And they have been long enough gone that nobody remembers them."
But he said Kingsbury's headstone draws people "into the bigger picture of history and monuments and what they stand for.
"Telling a story, sharing a story has a deeper aspect to it," he said. To tell that story behind the headstone is what matters most — to keep the history alive."
