What we know
Palmer Lake's first cemetery. An association of Dr. W. F. Thompson, William B. Daniels and Thomas Gaddes bought the site from Daniels of the Ben Lomond Ranch on Oct. 23, 1889; the town was to take it over in twenty years, but it was abandoned (Sabin, S-0019, pp. 55-57); PLHS dates that to the 1920s, 'when most of the graves were moved to Monument's cemetery'. Edward Thomas Kipps of London (1861-1889), a leather merchant, has a tall stone in an iron fence; more graves lie just east in the scrub oak, and the Dalton family has set a new stone (PLHS newsletter, 2007, S-0002). A story told by Dr. Thompson's sister had him buried here secretly; he died and was buried in Durango, Mexico, in November 1892 (Denver Daily News, Nov. 27, 1892, and his death certificate, per Sabin's editors). The 2012 county map names this 'Palmer Lake Old #1 and #2 Cemetery,' also 'Thompson-Kipps Cemetery,' with its pin about 0.4 mile east of the Kipps grave, and separately pins a 'single or small group burial along the trail' 0.14 mile north of it; both pins are also in Sec. 34, so neither fits the 1889 deed's Sec. 27 (S-0123). Edward T. Kipps of Beckenham, Kent, was a director of Dr. Thompson's hotel and sanitarium company in 1889, and he and his wife were the Thompsons' guests that June (News, June 16, 1889; Chieftain, June 28, 1889). Don Elliott's Cemeteries of Colorado gives 'Palmer Lake Old (Thompson-Kipps)' cemeteries No. 1 and No. 2 at 39 08.17N, 104 52.40W, Sec. 34, T10S R67W; read as degrees, minutes and seconds (his two-decimal figures elsewhere fit only that way), the point is within about 15 feet of this one (S-0127; I). Elliott's separate 'Greenland' cemetery is at the Greenland townsite, not the trail burial the county map labels 'Greenland Cemetery.'
Where it was
The Edward Thomas Kipps grave as a mapped feature in OpenStreetMap (node 558700611, 'Edward Thomas Kipps Grave'), 15 m from OSM's Kipps Trail; PLHS: 'One of the main trails, called Kipps Loop, leads hikers to its location on a high, lonely ridge' in Greenland Open Space (newsletter vol. 1 no. 1, 2007, S-0002). Conflict: the 1889 deed as given by McFarling describes 'a tract … 467 feet square in the extreme southeast corner of section 27, township 10 south, range 67 west' (Douglas County Book N p. 354; Sabin, S-0019, p. 56 n. 10), but this point is in Sec. 34, about 0.7 mile southwest of that corner (BLM PLSS). The grave is used. Good to a few hundred feet.
Placed from a written description, such as a land section, a distance from a landmark or an old survey note.
Sources
- S-0002: Palmer Lake Historical Society website (palmerdividehistory.org)
- S-0016: Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (coloradohistoricnewspapers.org)
- S-0019: Marion Savage Sabin, Palmer Lake: A Historical Narrative, ed. Lloyd McFarling; 2nd ed. by Roger Davis; "Fifth Edition" (Palmer Lake: Palmer Lake Historical Society, 2019); first published Denver: Sage Books, 1957
- S-0073: Lloyd McFarling, "News from the Town of Monument, 1874–79," The Colorado Magazine 35, no. 3 (July 1958), pp. 193–208
- S-0103: OpenStreetMap extracts via the Overpass API (2026-10-05)
- S-0118: CHNC newspapers: the Palmer Lake sweep, 1884–1900 (headline search "Palmer Lake")
- S-0120: Bureau of Land Management, National Public Land Survey System (PLSS) data: CadNSDI section and quarter-section polygons, Colorado
- S-0123: Douglas County Historic Resource Map (Douglas County Community Planning and Sustainable Development, the Douglas County History Research Center of Douglas County Libraries, and the Douglas County Historic Preservation Board, 2012), as put on Google Maps and Google Earth by the Larkspur Historical Society
- S-0127: Don Elliott, Cemeteries of Colorado, Douglas County page (columbinegenealogy.com/hub/cocem/Douglas.htm)
Sources are named in the text above. Numbers such as S-0080 refer to our source list. Most newspaper quotations were read in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. Long quotations from recent books are shortened here.