Many travelers come into Ely on Highway 50, The Loneliest Road in America. This infamous two-lane highway serves as our main street. Driving in from the west means you’ll first  pass through our historic downtown, which includes our city courthouse built in 1870, the Hotel Nevada and Gambling Hall established in 1929, and plenty of other notable buildings that have withstood the test of time and now house the likes of coffeeshops and boutiques.

Coming in from the other direction means you’ll be going through McGill, a town with sites and history all to its own. And once you arrive in Ely, the east side of town claims the best-preserved, most complete railyard complex in the country: the Nevada Northern Railway. And so, one stretch of road guides traffic through an all-encompassing City of Ely, east and west. But that has not always been the case.

Don’t be mistaken, the route from point A to point B has pretty much remained the same. The City of Ely, on the other hand, has not always been considered singular. In fact, in its earliest beginnings, what existed was the kindling town of Ely and nearby was the lone, equally bustling, neighboring community to the east. This location was known as… East Ely. No files indicate how long it took early citizens to settle on such a complicated name.

Eventually, the towns did join, but where is this point? Where did East Ely finally share borders with the town of Ely? There are certainly those who would consider the current four-way junction of Highway 50 and Great Basin Boulevard to be where “X marks the spot.” All the same, transcripts tell a different story. There is a location, where turkey vultures spread their wings every year, that’s still intact and in use. It lays on the grounds of what was once considered to be the very outskirts of Ely. Passing by today, it’s almost impossible to believe it was once on the edge. The place in question? The City of Ely Cemetery.

“The cemetery is where it is because that was the outskirts of town. They put it there,” said Sean Pitts, Director of the East Ely Depot Museum. Pitts has 35-years’ experience in history as a profession. He has taught for Great Basin College, is considered a leading authority on eastern Nevada history, and is the only official historian in a 185-mile radius of Ely. “Ely and East Ely just kind of grew together and the cemetery is a kind of middle point.”

White Pine County is filled with historic cemeteries (Hamilton, Osceola, and Cherry Creek, to name a few) but documentation and convenience lend themselves to the Cemetery of Ely. Case in point, Ely’s final resting place for many is also a heavy geocaching location.

We can’t exactly pinpoint when the cemetery was officially instituted, but records date as far back as 1908. This doesn’t come as a surprise, as there were no mortuaries in Ely before the early 1900s. At that time, it was left to the churches to take care of the bodies. We also know that headstones and funeral services cost upwards of $165.00 in cash, roughly more than $2000.00 in today’s terms. In other words, services and offical burials were not common in Ely’s earliest days.

But while we shed light on small details of the past, we continue to be left questioning larger specifics. There is still so much of Ely Cemetery’s dead that we will never know. More than a handful of those buried have little information to them besides their name. Several of them were immigrants working in the mines and left their families back in their home countries. These men’s only testament to us that they were alive at all is not their headstone. The only real documents we can look to that prove their existence are their final paychecks.

What was the life expectancy rate? Based solely on the mortuary material and gravestones, it’s difficult to say. However, the number of stones that display those who lived into their 80s and 90s is largely surpassed by the ones who sadly never even made it to adolescence.

Old stories of Ely tell who may be found in the cemetery, and how dangerous times were.

On December 12, 1890, Henry “Hank” Parish was hung from the neck behind the Ely courthouse in one of the town’s last public hangings. Parish had grown a reputation as a “lover of murder and has always been as fearless as he has been brutal,” stated the Ely Times of the day. He was known for many “terrors” in southern Nevada, including the stabbing and killing of a P.J. Thompson at Royal City for cheating at a poker game, thus his sentence “to stretch hemp.” Because of the hanging’s proximity to the courthouse, city employees swear the building is haunted, and all refer to the ghost as Hank. A gravestone at the Ely Cemetery can be found bearing his name.

Another able-to-find grave, with a broken cross headstone, is that of Dmitar Dragosovac. Dragosovac was fatally shot in front of his nineteen-year-old daughter in 1926 at Collins Ranch in Bothwick by William P. Phillips. Phillips claimed self-defense in shooting Dragosovac, saying that he grew violent after being accused of stealing fence staples. The daughter’s testimony said otherwise, and the crime was eventually slated as manslaughter. According to the Ely Times of the day, “The verdict was a compromise.”

If you’ve received a professional tour of the Nevada Northern Railway, you’ve without a doubt heard the story of Carmine Acquafondata. Acquafondata was an immigrant who hailed from San Pietro Avellana, Italy. He had found his way to Ely in 1921, bringing along his wife and six children. He promptly secured a job at the railroad. Three years later, at the age of 45, Acquafondata suffered the bloodiest of casualties. It was on August 15 that he broke an unspoken rule: do not jump between train cars. As he was passing through, one of the cars clamped to the other, instantly crushing the man in the middle… but not instantly killing him; however, Acquafondata’s fellow rail workers knew what would happen the moment they separated the locks. And so, they invited Acquafondata’s family to the railyard to say their final farewells. His time came only when the clasps that were bounding him to life were uncoupled, and ripped him apart. His grave can be found in the Ely Cemetery, misspelled.

Much more recently, in 2018, a report involving the Ely Cemetery was printed in local newspapers. A casket had been stolen from the grounds. It was at 11:00 a.m. on May 8 that a City of Ely employee revealed a grave site had been tampered with. When officers arrived, it was immediately determined that someone’s final resting place had been unearthed. The violator had clearly taken their time. The hole was a perfect rectangle and no traces were left behind. It was as if someone had lasered open the ground and lifted the body out with careful precision. Even more troubling, the grave belonged to a Douglas Evan Nelson, who died on August 7, 1942, as an infant. The mystery of the graveyard continues, as no offenders have been caught.

Perhaps you wish to take a self- guided tour and weave your way through the tombstones. Whether it’s geogaching, attempting to find the graves listed in this article, or taking on the challenge of discovering the oldest headstone,  you’ll now can carry with you some knowledge before stepping into Ely’s garden of the dead.

Special thanks to Jamie Noyes and Nicole Romero, whose insight, time spent researching, and providing resources were invaluable in making this article come together. And to the state’s best storyteller, Sean Pitts, whose spreading of historical facts cannot be gratified enough.