Hillcrest Cemetery, Listed!

The Hillcrest Cemetery provides a birds’ eye perspective of Deer Lodge’s growth from a pioneer community to a one that continues to contribute to the vitality of the state. Early burial practices are illustrated in the cemetery’s simple layout with a central crossroad, natural setting high atop a hill, remnant wooden markers, modest obelisk monuments, and upright imported marble tombstones. As the community stabilized and grew, zinc and locally produced gravestones followed.

The burials reflect all levels of the social, professional, and economic status in the early community from its documented inception in 1870 to 1967 when the prison gravesites were refurbished. The cemetery includes burials for those removed from the first community cemetery, those interred from the nearby federal penitentiary, Masons, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Japanese interments of the railroad workers who kept the Deer Lodge railyards functioning, and many of Montana’s earliest pioneers who helped lay the foundation of the State of Montana such as the Stuart brothers, Conrad Kohrs, John Bielenberg, and two children of copper king William A. Clark.

Listed March 13, 2023