killed in accidents or victims of avalanches in wintertime. Undertakers set up shop in the city, taking some of their dead into Ute on a road, no longer extant, that entered the northern edge of the cemetery. They did enough business that many were some of the first in Aspen to list their telephone numbers in advertisements. Those unable to afford one often performed their own services in the cemetery and erected their own monuments. The city's annual Decoration Day (now Memorial Day) ceremonies were held at the cemetery. This led to some occasional efforts to maintain the cemetery, most significantly in 1886. By 1888 two competing railroad lines had reached Aspen, giving mourners access to the kind of cut stone that could make fancier grave markers. The following year Aspen Grove Cemetery opened on the slopes below Smuggler Mountain. It was perhaps harder to reach but offered a more planned, rural cemetery atmosphere with planted aspens in rows and a carriage access road with turnaround and became the burial ground preferred by middle-class and wealthy citizens. The less affluent, and miners with no local family, continued to be buried in Ute. In 1890, one of the trains brought 15 government-issue markers meant for the veterans' graves at Ute. The local Grand Army of the Republic veterans' organization began cleaning up the area where those graves currently are with the intention, never realized, of arranging them around a monument. The two rows, an arrangement which suggests an infantry formation, were completed with later veterans who died in Aspen. All of the Civil War veterans buried are from the Union, although there are reportedly two Confederate veterans in the unmarked graves. In its first decade, Aspen had grown from a primitive collection of tents and log cabins to city of more than 10,000, with a luxury hotel and opera house. That growth and prosperity came to an abrupt end in 1893. In response to that year's economic crisis, Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which had up to then insured the federal government was a steady buyer of much of Aspen's silver. The private market was much smaller, and many of the miners and other businessmen who had come to the city left to try their luck elsewhere in the years afterward. Potato farming and ranching helped sustain Aspen through the beginning of the period known as the city's "quiet