Ertel Funeral Home

The Ertel Funeral Home at 42 North Market Street in Cortez was built in 1936 to the designs of the Denver architect Walter H. Simon. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 7, 1995, under reference 95001248, and is recognized as a distinctive example of regional revival architecture in the Four Corners country of southwestern Colorado.

Simon's design blends Mission Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, and Pueblo Revival elements in a single composition. The stuccoed walls, parapeted roofline, projecting canales, and arched openings draw on the Mission and Spanish Colonial vocabulary popular in commercial architecture of the period, while the massing and detailing of the parapets and door surrounds incorporate Pueblo Revival inflections drawn from the older earthen building tradition of the Southwest. The result is a small but carefully composed building that brought a sophisticated urban revival idiom to a rural county seat.

The funeral home served the residents of Cortez and Montezuma County during a period in which Cortez was emerging as the commercial center of the Mesa Verde region. Its construction in the depths of the Great Depression speaks to the determination of the Ertel family to invest in a permanent civic building, and the choice of a Denver architect signaled the ambition of that investment.

The building remains in private ownership today and continues to be recognized for its architectural distinction within the Cortez commercial district.

Within Colorado's adobe-influenced tradition, the Ertel Funeral Home represents the Depression-era extension of Pueblo Revival into commercial building types, alongside the contemporary courthouses, schools, and tourist hotels that adopted the same vocabulary across the southern half of the state.