Concordia Cemetery
El Paso, El Paso County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Known as Concordia during the 1840s, this area was the home of Chihuahua trader Hugh Stephenson. In 1856 his wife, Juana (Ascarate), was buried in what is now part of Concordia Cemetery. The graveyard gained widespread use in the 1880s when El Pasoans drove three miles to Concordia to bury their dead. By 1890 various sections had been purchased by different groups and were designated Catholic, Masonic, Jewish, Black, Chinese, Military, Jesuit, city, and county. Buried here are gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, and numerous civic leaders, pioneers, and war veterans. (1984) Concordia Cemetery Established 1856 Historic Texas Cemetery - 2005
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On land once known as Concordia—home of Chihuahua trader Hugh Stephenson, whose wife Juana was laid to rest here in 1856—this ground grew into El Paso's great frontier burial place. By the 1880s townsfolk drove three miles out to inter their dead, and by 1890 the grounds had been parceled into Catholic, Masonic, Jewish, Black, Chinese, Military, Jesuit, and other sections, a mosaic of the borderland's peoples. Among the thousands who rest here is the notorious gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, alongside pioneers, civic leaders, and war veterans.
Why it matters
Few American cemeteries so vividly map the diverse, layered society of the frontier Southwest, where cultures, faiths, and reputations—outlaw and civic alike—share the same El Paso earth.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The land that became Concordia Cemetery began as something far more intimate than a graveyard: it was home. In the 1840s this stretch of the El Paso district, known then as Concordia, belonged to Hugh Stephenson, a trader whose business reached south into Chihuahua, deep in the Mexican interior. This was borderland country in the fullest sense — a place where the United States, Mexico, and the trade routes between them met and mingled along the Rio Grande.
El Paso in those years sat at a genuine crossroads. It was a desert waypoint on the long roads between the American Southwest and northern Mexico, shaped by Spanish and Mexican settlement long before it was shaped by Anglo-American arrivals. The peoples, faiths, and languages that would later fill Concordia's separate sections were already flowing through the region, drawn by trade, by the river, and by the promise of a rough new frontier.
By the 1880s that frontier was changing fast. The railroads reached El Paso in that decade, turning a small border settlement into a booming, brawling town almost overnight. A growing city needs a place to bury its dead, and Concordia — three miles out from the center — became that place, absorbing the whole restless variety of the frontier Southwest.
People & events
The cemetery's first chapter is a love story ending in grief. Hugh Stephenson, the Chihuahua trader who made his home at Concordia, buried his wife Juana Ascarate here in 1856, in what was then family ground. Her grave gave the place its origin, much as a single burial gave rise to many a frontier cemetery.
What began as private ground became the city's own in the 1880s, when El Pasoans took to driving the three miles out to Concordia to inter their dead. By 1890 the cemetery had been divided among a remarkable array of communities, each purchasing its own section: Catholic and Jewish, Masonic and Jesuit, Black and Chinese, along with military, city, and county grounds. Few maps of a single town's society are as vivid as that list of sections carved into one desert cemetery.
And then there is the name that draws the most visitors. John Wesley Hardin, one of the most notorious gunfighters of the Old West, is buried at Concordia — an outlaw laid to rest amid the pioneers, civic leaders, and war veterans who built the town he ended his days in. That mingling of the respectable and the notorious in the same earth is the truest possible portrait of a frontier city.
Its place in the American story
Concordia Cemetery is one of the great documents of the American frontier Southwest, and it tells its story not in words but in geography. The separate sections — Catholic, Masonic, Jewish, Black, Chinese, Military, Jesuit — are a map of the peoples who converged on the border in the nineteenth century, each carrying its own faith, its own language, and its own way of honoring the dead.
That diversity is the deeper meaning of the American West, so often flattened in popular memory into a single mythic figure with a six-shooter. The real West was a place where Mexican and Anglo, Jewish and Catholic, Chinese and Black communities lived and labored and died within sight of one another. Concordia preserves that layered reality in a way few other places can, because it kept the record honestly, section by section.
The presence of John Wesley Hardin ties the site to the enduring national fascination with the gunfighter era — but the cemetery's true significance runs wider than any one legend. It is the resting place of a whole borderland society, outlaw and clergyman, immigrant and pioneer, soldier and civic leader, all claimed by the same ground.
If you visit
Concordia is a large, sprawling, sun-baked place, and it rewards visitors who come ready to explore rather than glance. Give yourself real time to wander, and let the layout itself be your guide — the great pleasure here is moving between the distinct sections and feeling the town's whole society open up around you.
Seek out the different community grounds and notice how each one carries its own character in the shapes of the stones, the symbols, and the languages inscribed on them. The Chinese section, the Jewish section, the Catholic and military grounds — read side by side, they tell you more about frontier El Paso than any single monument could. Many visitors also make a point of finding John Wesley Hardin's grave, and it is worth the search, if only for the strangeness of an infamous gunfighter resting among the city's founders.
Dress for the desert — shade is scarce and the sun is strong — and treat the grounds with the quiet they deserve. Concordia sits within El Paso itself, which makes it an easy and unforgettable stop on any trip through the borderland, a single cemetery that holds the whole crossroads in its soil.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Hugh Stephenson
- · Juana Ascarate
- · John Wesley Hardin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Chihuahuita
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Chihuahuita — "Little Chihuahua" — grew from an 1818 Spanish land grant to Ricardo Brusuelas into El Paso's oldest neighborhood. After the Rio Grande became the international border in 1848 and the railroad arrived in 1881, it swelled into a crowded gateway ward, and its riverfront gave residents a front-row view of the Mexican Revolution across the water after 1910. Long neglected, the district was recognized for its historic significance by the city in 1991.
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Born in Bonham in 1853 and named for the founder of Methodism, John Wesley "Wes" Hardin became one of the most notorious gunmen of the Old West, claiming to have killed more than thirty men while insisting he only killed to save his own life. He served fifteen years in state prison for murder, was pardoned, and in May 1895 opened a law office in El Paso. Three months later he was shot dead by city constable John Selman.
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