Fairview Cemetery

Fairview Cemetery occupies a sloping ten-acre tract at 1134 Cerrillos Road on the southern edge of historic Santa Fe. The burial ground was established in 1884 by a consortium of Anglo Protestant residents who, unable to use the older Catholic camposantos surrounding the parish churches, organized a non-denominational cemetery on what was then open land outside the city. Fairview operated as the principal civic burial ground for the Protestant and secular communities of Santa Fe for the next several decades.

The cemetery's surviving small buildings, including a chapel-office and a low perimeter wall, are built in the Pueblo Revival idiom that John Gaw Meem and his contemporaries helped codify across Santa Fe in the early twentieth century. Earth-toned stucco walls, projecting vigas, flat or shallow parapeted roofs, and deep-set wooden window openings tie the cemetery's built fabric to the broader adobe vocabulary of the surrounding city. Markers within the grounds reflect a range of Anglo, Hispano, and Jewish memorial traditions and include the graves of territorial governors, judges, merchants, and railroad workers.

The cemetery is significant as a record of the Anglo and non-Catholic settlement of Santa Fe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and as a representative example of the application of Pueblo Revival architecture to a civic landscape rather than a residence or institutional building. The grounds are administered today by a nonprofit preservation foundation.

Fairview Cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 under reference 04001517 for its historical and architectural significance. The site is open to the public during posted hours and is a quiet contributor to the larger Santa Fe adobe corridor that runs from the central plaza south along Cerrillos Road through the historic neighborhoods of Don Gaspar and Barrio La Cañada.