The desolate little cemetery at the northeast corner of Bear Creek Dog Park has gotten some much-needed attention.

In the past month, the El Paso County Parks Department has replaced a dilapidated fence around the seven grave markers – the burial site of people who lived at the El Paso County Poor Farm.

The poor farm operated in some capacity from the 1880s to the early 1970s. Its residents were mostly indebted and in need of long-term care in a time without social safety nets like Medicaid and Social Security. The Poor Farm also opened a tuberculosis care wing in the early 1900s.

The Charmaine Nymann Community Garden is roughly where the main building once stood.

The cemetery is a relocation of the graves, which were disturbed in the 1950s during a widening of 21st Street in Colorado Springs. Only one person is identified among the burials: Henry Parks, an Arkansas man who died on the farm due to complications from epilepsy at the age of 46 in 1900.

A small newspaper obituary from Nov. 11, 1900, reads that Parks was “well known to a great many people.”

The cemetery is technically on private property, though no one has maintained the plot in some time. The grave markers are chipped and fading, and a wooden fence around the cemetery was in disrepair.

An El Paso County spokesperson said that parks officials intervened because “the cemetery appears to be on County property by most citizens.”

The spokesperson said that the new fence and decorative gravel mulch “helped to beautify the space and made it easier to maintain in the future.”